John David Wash­ing­ton: ​‘I’m bet­ter acquaint­ed with heights now’

Leav­ing behind a career in Amer­i­can foot­ball, John David Wash­ing­ton has been mak­ing steady waves in the act­ing sphere. His most laud­ed and recog­nis­able roles have come from a num­ber of films con­cerned with abus­es of pow­er, includ­ing his lead­ing turn in Spike Lee’s Oscar-win­ning BlacK­kKlans­man; and a part as a dis­il­lu­sioned police offi­cer in Reinal­do Mar­cus Green’s Mon­sters and Men. It’s safe to say that his role in Christo­pher Nolan’s ​“time inver­sion” thriller Tenet will be his wildest ven­ture yet.

LWLies: Time trav­el and quan­tum mechan­ics are always a tricky con­cept to get your head around. How did you get to grips with a script as strange as this one? 

Wash­ing­ton: The first time I read it, it took me about four and a half hours. Obvi­ous­ly, I had a whole bunch of ques­tions for Chris and he answered all of them every time. We went piece by piece. We didn’t have to do the whole thing in five days, we did have time to gain more and more under­stand­ing every day, from pre-pro­duc­tion and then on to pro­duc­tion. So it was just liv­ing with it for as long as we did, and pry­ing out these dis­cov­er­ies in front of the cam­era. It was encour­ag­ing every day, like, ​‘What can we do to top what we did yes­ter­day?’ We found some­thing new and some­thing excit­ing that we could take with us when we get to the Italy loca­tion. The expo­nen­tial growth of under­stand­ing was quite a journey.

It sounds like the process of work­ing on this was quite metic­u­lous. Is that what drew you to Christo­pher Nolan as a filmmaker?

It’s a com­bi­na­tion of that and the sto­ry. As com­plex as his movies can be, I do have an under­stand­ing – or, at least, I feel invest­ed in the char­ac­ters. He allows per­for­mances to breathe, he is metic­u­lous and sci­ence-fic­tion savvy. He lets the sto­ry take hold. He real­ly fea­tures his char­ac­ters. Even on set, it felt like this was a char­ac­ter-dri­ven movie. It’s just a healthy, beau­ti­ful mar­riage between the mythol­o­gy and the more free-spir­it­ed things that we found on those days in the per­for­mance. They say it in the trail­er – and it real­ly is fit­ting for the expe­ri­ence of watch­ing it – don’t try to under­stand it. Feel it. There’s a dis­cus­sion that can be had and there’s also just enjoy­ing the char­ac­ters reveal­ing them­selves as the movie goes along.

Did you have a par­tic­u­lar inter­est in sci­ence fic­tion or any of his films before you took the role?

Absolute­ly. When I first found out he want­ed to meet me, I was like, ​‘That’s a win right there.’ I thought things didn’t need to go fur­ther than that. I real­ly thought that way because I was such a huge fan.

The film­ing of this alone sound­ed like a pret­ty gigan­tic operation.

Yes. It was amaz­ing to go to all of these dif­fer­ent coun­tries and see them give the movie a dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ty. It real­ly gave it great scale and a real­i­ty that we can con­nect to as a movie goer. We’ll be in there watch­ing and it’ll have legs because it’s not all green screen.

Orig­i­nal sci-fi action is start­ing to feel like some­thing of a rar­i­ty, espe­cial­ly on the scale that you men­tioned. Did you find work­ing on this scale daunt­ing at all?

I didn’t look at it that way, I don’t think I could afford to. We were chip­ping away every day, con­trol­ling what we could con­trol to tell the best sto­ry we could, whether it be in a car, or if I’m run­ning or sit­ting down say­ing six pages of dia­logue. It took the same lev­el of con­cen­tra­tion and trust in your scene part­ners and Chris.

You’ve spo­ken about putting the con­tin­u­ous work in your char­ac­ter and your trust in Chris – were you work­ing on the themes much while you were on set every day? 

There were so many of those dis­cus­sions. I would ask him tech­ni­cal ques­tions some­times, set ques­tions, or ask him to tell me war sto­ries about anoth­er movie. Just things like that because, I mean, it’s Chris Nolan – he’s made some of the best movies ever made. We talked about that kind of stuff all of the time.

Any war sto­ries of your own?

I’m bet­ter acquaint­ed with heights now. It’s inter­est­ing, the year I had last year, film­ing a movie in Greece and then film­ing this, I had to deal with heights, and I wasn’t that good with it until after 2019. So in any­thing mov­ing for­ward… I think I’ll be a lot bet­ter with it.

Did you get to do much stunt work through­out the shoot?

I did! It was thrilling, quite an adren­a­line rush. But shout out to the pro­fes­sion­als, who are crazy. Those guys are insane. I respect them every day for what they do. They make the movie look great. I did do my fair share, I did feel like I was a part of the team. I did as much as they’d let me do.

Was there a par­tic­u­lar sequence that you liked work­ing on?

There’s a sequence that we worked real­ly hard on. When I read it I was like, ​‘How is this going to work?’, because I’d nev­er read any­thing like it before. And again, with no green screen, we had to do it. I can’t say what it is, but there’s a par­tic­u­lar scene that I’m very proud of because we worked our butts off for it. Jack­son [Spi­dell], our fight coor­di­na­tor, Kyle [Mclean], all of those guys, we worked extreme­ly hard. They had done a lot of fight­ing in movies and they even said that they had nev­er done stuff quite like this before which is excit­ing to me. It’s excit­ing to hear that those vet­er­ans say that about their craft. They’ve seen it, so I’m excit­ed to see what it looks like.

Tenet is released in the UK on 26 August in the UK and 3 Sep­tem­ber in the US. Read the LWLies review.