The 1998 role that pushed Denzel Washington out of his comfort zone: “My agents send the bad ones away”
Denzel Washington can do it all.
On the dramatic front, he is untouchable, and he’s got the awards, good reviews, and paycheques to prove it, and he’s also very funny when he needs to be, either as part of a drama or in a straight-up comedy. He’s a proven action star, a romantic lead, and in recent years has shown that he is more than capable of playing a villain. There’s a reason why his name regularly appears in lists of the greatest actors of all time.
In 1998, the two-time Oscar winner appeared in a type of movie that his fans weren’t used to seeing him in, playing Detective John Hobbes in Fallen, investigating a series of murders with a supernatural bent. The film was a thriller-cum-horror from director Gregory Hoblit and the closest Washington has ever come to starring in a horror, remaining a fascinating addition to his impressive filmography.
On the surface, an actor of Washington’s calibre might seem overqualified for this sort of thing, but in the late 1990s, horror still had a stink about it. You can see this in an interview Washington conducted with film critic John C Tibbets at a press junket for the movie, where the latter asks what drew the iconic actor to the role, given that horror movies often lacked “intelligence”, in his words. Washington explained that there was one person in particular responsible for this change of pace.
“I don’t get to read a lot of screenplays in this genre,” he said, “I guess that’s a credit to my agents who send the bad ones away or whatever. They said, ‘Denzel, we got something going here, you know’, my agent said… Once I knew they wanted me to do it and read it, which seems like it took 15 minutes, because when you get a good screenplay, it’s like ‘boom’.”
In Washington’s own words, he’d never appeared in a horror movie before, but he had starred in films that “were just as frightening, but for the wrong reasons”. As well as the strong script, he was also drawn to Fallen due to its similarities with another project he was working on at the time.
Despite his enthusiasm for the project and his willingness to try something new, Washington’s risk did not pay off, because Fallen was a box office flop, making just over $25million from a $45million budget.
This is strange given its lead’s star power and the inclusion of Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and John Goodman in the cast, but critics weren’t crazy about it. The core idea was praised, but reviewers weren’t happy with its execution, which they felt was shallow and underdeveloped. In the cold light of day, Fallen is neither a great Denzel Washington movie nor a horror classic.
This disappointing end result doesn’t matter all that much. Washington was something of a trailblazer, given how many famous actors are starring in horror films these days. The genre has come a very long way since critics could openly call it dumb in interviews.
