“I wanted to play the part”: the ‘Best Picture’ winner Denzel Washington missed out on
This time of year is usually a pretty busy one for Denzel Washington, not because he’s necessarily got his hands full making movies, although that is often the case, of course, but because it’s awards season, and the man has won plenty of those.
He has been asked to turn up to the Oscars as a nominee no fewer than nine times, as early as 1987, for the apartheid drama Cry Freedom and as recently as 2021 for Joel Coen’s acclaimed The Tragedy of Macbeth. Washington has won a golden statuette twice in that time, firstly for 1989’s civil war epic Glory and then a ‘Best Actor’ award in 2001 for the cop thriller Training Day opposite Ethan Hawke.
And not only has he been recognised for his work individually, but he has also featured in some of the finest movies ever made, under some true directing greats, including Spike Lee on several occasions, Ridley Scott, Robert Zemeckis and one of the best of all time in Sidney Lumet, on 1986’s Power.
However, one Oscar-winning movie made by the man behind JFK and Natural Born Killers passed Washington by, and chatting to GQ about some of the roles he turned down during his prestigious career, the actor namechecked David Fincher’s Seven, the George Clooney drama Michael Clayton, and the Oscar-winning Vietnam War drama Platoon from 1986, directed by Oliver Stone.
On wanting a role in the latter, Washington said, “That and Full Metal Jacket. They were like, ‘Well, [director Stanley Kubrick] he doesn’t send out his scripts’. I was like, ‘Well, then what do you want me to do?’ (On) Platoon, I wanted to play the part Willem Dafoe played.”
That role was of Sgt Elias, which was based on a man Stone said he knew from his days in the US Army serving in Vietnam. Dafoe was nominated for ‘Best Actor’ for his performance in the film, which picked up eight nods in total, winning four, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ for Stone.
Platoon was also an enormous box office hit, costing just $6million to make but bringing in more than $135m in ticket sales, and has since gone down as one of the greatest films ever made. Inspired by Stone’s time in combat, the film serves as part of the director’s ‘Vietnam trilogy’ that also encompasses the Tom Cruise-starrer Born on the Fourth of July and 1993’s Heaven & Earth.
Washington didn’t waste any time letting his disappointment derail his incredible progress, however, being Oscar-nominated three times in the following five years, including for Lee’s epic biopic Malcom X. He also starred in 1993’s Philadelphia with Tom Hanks, which was nominated for four Oscars and won ‘Best Actor’ for Hanks.
The actor is likely to have another high-profile couple of years coming up, thanks to his appearances not only in Ryan Coogler’s Marvel blockbuster Black Panther 3, but also in a new Netflix movie that has just wrapped filming in New York called Here Comes the Flood, with Robert Pattinson.
He’s also likely to make a fourth instalment of his hit Equalizer series, despite the third movie originally being planned to be the last. The Antoine Fuqua-directed trilogy has grossed some $600m worldwide and began in 2014, with Washington’s former Marine Robert McCall handing out violent justice to gang members as far flung as Boston and Sicily.
