“I don’t want to get used to that”: the role Denzel Washington never wanted to play again
One of the most impressive things about the enduring appeal of Denzel Washington is that he’s remained one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood for decades without doing what so many of his A-list peers have done and reprising multiple roles in a number of sequels.
There’s only one character the actor has ever played more than once: The Equalizer trilogy’s figurehead, Robert McCall. Not only that, but Ridley Scott’s long-awaited sequel Gladiator II will mark the first time he’s appeared in the sequel to an original movie he wasn’t in, and it arrives 43 years after he made his feature debut in 1981’s Carbon Copy.
In an era where franchises and properties are often the biggest hooks in luring audiences to their local multiplex, Washington is virtually in a class of his own. His name is the draw, and people have shown they’ll show up based entirely on his involvement.
The two-time Academy Award winner has been happy to continually freshen things up by avoiding a deliberate return to the well outside of his Equalizer trio, but there’s one specific type of character he swore he’d never play again after putting himself through the physical and emotional wringer the first time around.
Sylvester Stallone may have brought Rocky Balboa to the screen eight times over the course of almost half a century, but after embodying Rubin Carter in The Hurricane, Washington had no interest in returning to the ring. Playing one boxer was more than enough, and the toll it took on his body and psyche convinced him that if any scripts came across his desk that required him to show off his pugilistic skills, he wasn’t going to give them the time of day.
“I remember I was with Michael Spinks, the ex-light heavyweight champ,” he recalled of his arduous training. “I was preparing for the film The Hurricane, and we were actually sparring. Not me and Spinks, but me and another guy. I started getting a little slower and headaches, and I said to Michael, ‘I’m starting to get headaches’, and he said, ‘Oh, you’ll get used to that’. And that’s when I stopped. I don’t want to get used to that.”
Even though he gave a towering performance that earned him an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Actor’, Washington wasn’t keen on replicating his sacrifices on another project. He had to look like a boxer, eat like a boxer, train like a boxer, and convince as a boxer in the in-ring sequences while also doing the dramatic heavy lifting of retelling the story of a high-profile athlete who spent almost two decades behind bars after being wrongfully imprisoned for murder.
Even before The Hurricane, Washington regularly worked out at boxing gyms to maintain his fitness, but after production wrapped, he dropped the pastime after being pushed to the limit.
