The role Denzel Washington is furious he only got to play once: “It pissed me off”
In his career, Denzel Washington has only made sequels to one of his movies, preferring instead to play a new character every time he signs on for a feature film.
Long before he made The Equalizer in 2014 and followed it up with a second and third instalment in 2018 and 2023, though, the iconic actor starred in several movies whose source material seemingly demanded sequels. Interestingly, though, Washington only expressed annoyance at not getting the chance to reprise one of these characters – and he even claimed it pissed him off that the movie ended stayed a one and done.
Washington’s first brush with a potential franchise came in 1995 when he starred as Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins in the neo-noir Devil in a Blue Dress. That film was based on a hardboiled detective novel by Walter Mosley, the first in a series of 16 thrillers starring the character, a World War II veteran who becomes an unlicensed private eye in Los Angeles. Unfortunately for Washington, although the film was well reviewed and he received plaudits for his performance, it didn’t set the box office alight. In fact, it barely scraped back the cost of its budget, which put the kibosh on any sequel plans.
In 1999, Washington played another long-running literary detective, Jeffrey Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme, in The Bone Collector. Rhyme is a quadriplegic detective who works with Amelia Sachs, a rookie patrol officer, serving as his eyes and ears in the field. The movie followed them as they investigated a serial killer terrorising New York City.
This time, the movie wasn’t particularly well-liked by critics, although it made $151million at the box office, which would usually have guaranteed a sequel. It never materialised, though, and to date, The Bone Collector is the only one of Rhyme’s 16 novels that has been adapted for the screen.
Then, in 2004, Washington played his third character with appearances in multiple books: Marcus Creasy, the vengeful former CIA officer turned bodyguard who kills his way across Mexico City to retrieve the kidnapped young girl he has been charged with protecting. Novelist AJ Quinnell created Creasy, and the character starred in five thrillers, the last of which was released in 1996. Unfortunately for Washington, he didn’t seem to know this until after he’d made Man on Fire, which, of course, ended with Creasy dying after successfully rescuing little ‘Pita’ Ramos.
Hilariously, when asked by Phase 9 if he intended to bring Creasy back from the dead to adapt any of the other novels, Washington deadpanned, “I honestly did not know about those other books, so thank you for that. I saw The Bourne Supremacy the other day and it pissed me off! He has a nice little franchise going there. Maybe I could do another one of these Creasy stories. We can just say that he fell asleep at the end of this one.”
While it seems like a tremendous oversight for Washington to have no clue about his character appearing in multiple novels, it’s undoubtedly amusing to think of him seething with jealousy in a cinema as he watched Matt Damon establish his most iconic character in the first Bourne sequel.
Indeed, it’s entirely possible the sting of this missed opportunity encouraged Washington to finally seize the day when he played another vengeful killing machine, former marine and retired DIA officer Robert McCall, in The Equaliser. As soon as that movie banked $190m at the box office, Washington said, “This is my guy” and quickly made two more ultra-violent McCall adventures.
As a postscript to the whole tale, many fans have argued that Washington did, in fact, get to make a Man on Fire sequel – it just happened to occur in an Equalizer movie. His precocious co-star Dakota Fanning was reunited with him in The Equalizer 3 as a grown woman, and even though they were playing different characters, director Antoine Fuqua admitted, “We never talked about it collectively, but I’ve thought about it that way. You know, when Dakota said she was interested, I thought, ‘Ah yeah! This is Man on Fire, but years later – and this is what he’s doing.’”
