The one thing Denzel Washington will never do on a movie set again: “It taught me a lesson”
No actor arrives on the scene fully formed and knowing exactly how they’re going to approach their career, but at least Denzel Washington figured out relatively early on that there was one element of performance he never wanted to replicate.
Having been bitten by the acting bug as a teenager and inspired by the success enjoyed by inspirations and influences like Sidney Poitier and James Earl Jones, Washington didn’t waste much time letting the industry know that he had the potential to match, if not emulate, those two legends.
Not that it was blatantly obvious from the start, though, with the star’s 118-episode stint on the medical drama St Elsewhere hardly outlining him as a generational talent in the making, and much the same can be said about early big-screen outings in Carbon Copy and A Soldier’s Story in the early 1980s.
However, earning an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for what was only his fourth feature-length appearance in Cry Freedom certainly did the trick, with Washington going one better and taking home the same prize for Edward Zwick’s Glory, which was still only the seventh movie he’d ever been in.
Between those two points, Washington took top billing for the first time in co-writer and director Martin Stellman’s For Queen and Country, playing a British paratrooper discharged from the army who struggles to find a place in the world in the aftermath of his military status being taken away.
The crime drama bombed at the box office and was largely greeted with a shrug of apathy by critics, but it did at least make a major impression on Washington in a different way. He’s never been known as a method actor to the same extent as many of his peers, but when a scene required his character of Reuben James to get pissed up, he was all-in.
It was the first time he’d ever gotten drunk for real in service of a story, and it would also be the last, with the two-time Oscar winner admitting to The Guardian that “it taught me a lesson” he immediately learned from and then committed himself to never replicating for the rest of his professional life.
“That was the last time I ever drank while working,” he confessed, with Washington admitting that he’s worked with other performers “who’ve crossed that line” and gone for the authentically sozzled experience, but his dalliance with boozing on the job was strictly a one-time deal.
Most actors will be forced to play drunk at least once, and Washington was nothing if not convincing when he did just that in Robert Zemeckis’ Flight, but For Queen and Country taught him that pounding the bevvy in the name of realism was something he never wanted to subject himself to ever again.
