The role Denzel Washington would only play if he was killed off: “I said I wouldn’t do it”
Some actors are so protective of their personas that they try to die onscreen as little as possible, which is admittedly restricted more to those who prefer the action-orientated space. Then again, Denzel Washington is one of Hollywood’s marquee action stars, and he’s got no issues getting bumped off.
For instance, John Wayne made over 200 pictures throughout his career, and he didn’t make it to the end credits in less than ten of them. Arnold Schwarzenegger has never died in a film where he plays a human character, with the Terminator franchise the only time he’s been shuffled off his mortal coil.
Not everybody has to be Danny Trejo and make a point of dying almost every time they appear in a feature or a TV series, but Washington has never been shy in protecting his image and having scripts rewritten to ensure whoever he’s playing is still breathing when the lights come up, and it’s time for the audience to go home.
The two-time Academy Award winner has been killed 16 times over the years, ranging from Cry Freedom‘s Steve Biko to the title character in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. He’s died in action flicks, dramas, and even the wretched comedy Heart Condition, and on one occasion, he even put his foot down and refused to sign on the dotted line unless his demise was guaranteed.
“The first thing I wrote on my script was, ‘The wages of sin are death,'” he told Phase 9 of his immediate reaction to reading David Ayer’s Training Day screenplay. “The studio didn’t want the character to die, and I said I wouldn’t do it if that was the case. I wanted him to die in the worst way. That’s why I fell on the ground and crawled because the image was to crawl like a snake.”
Washington viewed corrupt cop Alonzo Harris as irredeemable, to such an extent that he wouldn’t allow him to avoid his comeuppance. After attempting to flee, the crooked detective is gunned down for trying to play too many angles at once, and his scheming ways come back to haunt him in a fatal fashion.
Winning his second Oscar and first for ‘Best Actor’ for his troubles, things would have turned out very differently for Washington and Training Day had the studio insisted that Harris survive. With a TV show based on the movie premiering in 2015 and repeated whispers of a prequel being in the works, it’s easy to understand why Warner Bros was reluctant to let the movie’s main character perish: because it had one eye on a franchise.
At the time, Washington had never made a sequel to any of his films, and the easiest way to guarantee he wouldn’t be inundated with offers for Training Day 2 was to guarantee the only way he’d get involved in the first one was if Harris paid for his crimes.
