The role reversal Denzel Washington waited 12 years for
Ask cinephiles to picture Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe together, and I’d wager they’ll immediately think of the two men sharing a cup of coffee in American Gangster. Of course, this wasn’t a friendly cup of joe between buddies. It was a polystyrene cup smacked off a cold interrogation table by Washington’s frustrated heroin kingpin Frank Lucas, followed by another cup slowly pushed toward Crowe’s Detective Richie Roberts, who was putting the screws to the man he knew he had dead to rights. It’s a masterful scene and one in which Washington brings nuance to real-life gangster Lucas while never letting us forget how dangerous he is.
Playing someone like Lucas opposite Crowe was something Washington had literally waited more than a decade for. You see, back in 1995, the two iconic stars faced off with each other in a very different kind of movie – one in which their roles were reversed.
In sci-fi actioner Virtuosity, Washington played the good guy, while Crowe played the bad guy – and what a bad guy he was. It’s obvious the Gladiator star had a ball playing SID 6.7, a virtual reality entity comprised of a hodgepodge of traits from the most violent serial killers in history. Of course, SID soon found his way into the real world in a regenerating android body and gleefully began causing havoc.
Depending on how charitable you want to be, Virtuosity would probably be filed under “not very good” or “so bad, it’s good”. Either way, the movie didn’t make much of an impression at the box office and wound up being consigned to the scrap heap along with similarly questionable 1990s cyberpunk movies like Johnny Mnemonic and Freejack.
Interestingly, though, Washington has admitted that, during the shoot, he did come to an important realisation. One night, he and Crowe shared a couple of cigars and a bottle of cognac in Crowe’s trailer, and a slightly inebriated Washington confessed that he wished he was playing SID 6.7 instead of the heroic ex-cop protagonist.
In his early career, Washington was mostly known for playing moral, upright characters in the likes of Glory, Cry Freedom and The Preacher’s Wife. He once told Movies, “Earlier in my career, playing roles like Steven Biko or Malcolm X, you know, for whatever reason, the folks in charge thought, ‘Oh, he’s the noble guy’ or whatever.”
As evidenced by his jealousy over Crowe’s part in Virtuosity, though, Washington clearly always wanted to take a walk on the wild side. He finally got his chance with corrupt cop Alonzo Harris in 2001’s Training Day – winning an Academy Award in the process – and from that point on, he never looked back. He revealed, “From the day I won the Oscar for Training Day, the scripts just changed”.
A series of harsher, grittier roles followed in pictures like Man on Fire, Out of Time, and Inside Man before he finally got to play his most villainous role yet in American Gangster. Fittingly, it happened to be opposite his old co-star Crowe, who was now on the side of the angels. The role reversal meant the star couldn’t help remarking that, “It’s funny how these things come around!”
