Lone Star: a profile of Denzel Washington in… | Little White Lies

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Lone Star: a pro­file of Den­zel Wash­ing­ton in sev­en chapters

22 Sep 2016

Words by Jessica Kiang

Sepia-toned portrait illustration of Denzel Washington, wearing a cowboy hat. Ornate border with floral designs and numerals.
Sepia-toned portrait illustration of Denzel Washington, wearing a cowboy hat. Ornate border with floral designs and numerals.
In a land­scape of total celebri­ty sat­u­ra­tion, is this enig­mat­ic Hol­ly­wood icon is the last of the pure movie stars?

Movie star­dom is a fick­le thing. You’re built up, you’re torn down, you’re papped, you’re slan­dered and you’re expect­ed to accept it all. And if, soon­er or lat­er, you punch a pho­tog­ra­ph­er or jump on a couch or have a high pro­file fling, that’s all part of the deal too: the only bad pub­lic­i­ty is no pub­lic­i­ty. And yet: Den­zel Wash­ing­ton. In between his movie roles and award podi­um appear­ances, where does he go? How has he achieved a 44 fea­ture-strong career (a remake of The Mag­nif­i­cent Sev­en will be num­ber 45), and main­tained a near-unri­valled lev­el of fame for decades, while remain­ing such an unknown quantity?

There are some films in which he’s incan­des­cent. He is still the only African-Amer­i­can to have won more than one act­ing Oscar (he has two). He is a Tony-win­ning the­atre actor, the author of a non-fic­tion best­seller, a soon to be three-time film direc­tor, as well as a father of four and a hus­band of 33 years. None of this is small change, and yet none of it is the stuff of thrilling mag­a­zine pro­files. Start inves­ti­gat­ing Washington’s star per­sona and, pret­ty quick­ly, you end up writ­ing a piece that more close­ly resem­bles a CV. To find the real Den­zel Wash­ing­ton, you need to rush the fortress from sev­er­al sides at once.

I got a part in a movie in 1986. I call it The N*gga They Couldn’t Kill – he raped a white woman and they tried to elec­tro­cute him but it didn’t work… And I called Sid­ney [Poiti­er] and said Man, they offered me $600,000 for The N*gga They Couldn’t Kill!’ And he told me the first two or three or four films you do in this busi­ness will dic­tate how you’re per­ceived.’ I turned it down and six months lat­er I got Cry Free­dom.”

This quote is from a 2010 inter­view for TimesTalk. Cry Free­dom was the break­out for Den­zel Hayes Wash­ing­ton Jr, but it was actu­al­ly his fourth the­atri­cal fea­ture film. His first had come six years pri­or, after a cou­ple of TV bit-parts and before he land­ed his reg­u­lar slot on hos­pi­tal dra­ma St Else­where. 1981’s Car­bon Copy sees Wash­ing­ton co-star­ring with George Segal and direct­ed by Michael Schultz, a black film­mak­er and more recent­ly a TV stal­wart on shows such as Broth­ers and Sis­ters, Arrow and Black-ish. Back then, Schultz spe­cialised in films like 1977’s Car Wash in which Richard Pry­or heads a mul­tira­cial ensem­ble chart­ing a chaot­ic day-in-the-life of an LA car wash facil­i­ty. It’s a com­e­dy with an edge of social com­ment, and Car­bon Copy also fits this bill.

Wash­ing­ton plays Roger Porter, who reveals him­self as son of the wealthy, suc­cess­ful (white) Wal­ter Whit­ney (Segal). The wacky results become more sober and inci­sive as the sto­ry unfolds. But the film is dat­ed, and the sex­ist por­tray­al of Whitney’s rapa­cious white wife blunts its pro­gres­sive cre­den­tials. It’s hard to tell if Whit­ney turns his back on his rich­es to forge a rela­tion­ship with his black son out of new­found pater­nal affec­tion or sim­ply to escape the vacu­ity of his old love­less lifestyle, to which he is now woke”.

How­ev­er, Wash­ing­ton is supreme­ly at ease, affa­ble and charis­mat­ic. His effort­less savoir faire may even work to the film’s detri­ment: the twist at the end is that Roger is not the ill-edu­cat­ed, no-hop­er street kid Whit­ney first believes him to be, but a sec­ond year pre-med stu­dent at his father’s own alma mater who took time out from his stud­ies to teach Dad a much need­ed life les­son about judg­ing by appear­ances. Prob­lem is, Washington’s sophis­ti­cat­ed aura of watch­ful, iron­ic intel­li­gence is so pal­pa­ble that there’s no moment at which we do not under­stand that Roger is play­ing a trick on Whitney.

Hence no sur­prise when the reveal occurs. But what’s even more strik­ing about this debut lead is how, maybe more than any that came after, it neat­ly cor­re­lates to the star­dom that Wash­ing­ton was on the verge of achiev­ing. Here the then-pro­gres­sive agen­da is that a black man could be seen as capa­ble of suc­ceed­ing with­in a soci­ety whose edi­fices are tem­ples of blind­ing white­ness. A more mod­ern view­er might desire to cri­tique those insti­tu­tions more rad­i­cal­ly than Car­bon Copy ever does. But this is the social cru­cible in which Den­zel Wash­ing­ton, the movie star, was forged. For con­text, con­sid­er that Car­bon Copy pre­miered when TV shows like Diff’rent Strokes and Ben­son were in their hey­day (both rep­re­sen­ta­tions of black­ness played for fish-out-of-water laughs by plac­ing it in a white con­text), years before even The Cos­by Show first aired, and a full decade before the wealthy fam­i­ly that Will Smith moved in with in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air were them­selves allowed to be black.

The mod­el estab­lished by Poiti­er in his quote tak­en from Washington’s unusu­al­ly can­did TimesTalk inter­view, films like Car­bon Copy, A Soldier’s Sto­ry and Cry Free­dom, for bet­ter, for worse, for rich­er, for bland­er, have dic­tat­ed how Wash­ing­ton has been per­ceived ever since. And those films were prod­ucts of their times – times which have a‑changed. Mean­while, the con­cep­tion of Wash­ing­ton as a pub­lic fig­ure has remained defi­ant­ly stable.

Oval portraits of two men, one labelled "Joe Miller" and the other "Malcolm X", against a brown background.

Out­side his films, Wash­ing­ton is rarely as unguard­ed as in the TimesTalk inter­view quot­ed above, and only very rarely courts con­tro­ver­sy. One instance occurs dur­ing that ses­sion, when he men­tions how he likened slav­ery to the Holo­caust in the com­pa­ny of some Jew­ish peo­ple – even the audi­ence in atten­dance seems unsure how to react until he reas­sures them. Anoth­er is when he report­ed­ly blew up at Quentin Taran­ti­no on the set of Crim­son Tide over Tarantino’s ner­vous-reflex-like ten­den­cy to sprin­kle his script rewrites with racial epi­thets. And he became the unwit­ting eye of a minor firestorm when one of the leaked Sony emails sug­gest­ed that the pro­por­tion­ate­ly dis­ap­point­ing over­seas box office for his 2014 film The Equal­iz­er proved that the inter­na­tion­al audi­ence was racist.”

While the pro­duc­er in ques­tion was at David Brent-ian pains to clar­i­fy that he him­self was not being racist (“I per­son­al­ly think Den­zel Wash­ing­ton is the best actor of his gen­er­a­tion.”) he did implic­it­ly urge the Sony pow­ers-that-were to recon­sid­er cast­ing African-Amer­i­can leads in gen­er­al, and Wash­ing­ton in par­tic­u­lar, in that type of film. Sim­ply as a mat­ter of savvy busi­ness strat­e­gy. Advice, inci­den­tal­ly, clear­ly not tak­en: The Mag­nif­i­cent Sev­en is a Sony pro­duc­tion and The Equal­iz­er is on track for a sequel. Beyond those iso­lat­ed inci­dents, Wash­ing­ton has main­tained an image of charm­ing, good-guy decen­cy that’s so imper­me­able as to be dou­ble Teflon-coated.

It’s hard to find any­one with a bad word to say about him – with the excep­tion of actor Bron­son Pin­chot whose assess­ment of his Courage Under Fire co-star at the AV Club (“one of the most unpleas­ant human beings I’ve ever met in my life”) is as scathing as it is unique. Far more often you hear co-stars and col­lab­o­ra­tors extolling Washington’s pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al excel­lence – from Spike Lee insist­ing he’s, the great­est actor of all time, peri­od” to Tom Han­ks first call­ing out his Philadel­phia co-star who shone because of his integri­ty” at the Oscars, and more recent­ly intro­duc­ing him at the Gold­en Globes as an artist who defines the times we all live in.”

Wash­ing­ton comes across in inter­views as a hum­ble man almost embar­rassed by his own mag­net­ism, with an immense tal­ent for which he is grate­ful to God (he is a devout Pen­te­costal Chris­t­ian who reads from the Bible dai­ly). And his dis­tinct­ly un-Hol­ly­wood lifestyle, long mar­riage and pri­vate pol­i­tics (aside from a spell as an out­spo­ken Oba­ma cham­pi­on dur­ing the 2008 cam­paign) cer­tain­ly haven’t con­tra­dict­ed that image. In fact he’s been on-mes­sage almost to a fault, as though his fame has a script from which he nev­er strays too far. Some of his favourite apho­risms seem to weave their way in and out of inter­views, films and pub­lic appear­ances to the point of white noise.

The quote, You’ll nev­er see a U‑Haul behind a hearse,” for exam­ple, a riff on you can’t take it with you,” appears in his 2006 book A Hand To Guide Me’; in the Jan­u­ary 2008 issue of O Mag­a­zine dur­ing an inter­view with Oprah; in 2009’s The Tak­ing of Pel­ham 123 (spo­ken by Washington’s char­ac­ter); in a Jan­u­ary 2010 press jun­ket; twice at a May 2014 talk to act­ing stu­dents; and it forms a cen­tral tenet of his 2015 com­mence­ment address to the grad­u­ates of Dil­lard Uni­ver­si­ty. It’s clear Wash­ing­ton takes his respon­si­bil­i­ty as a role mod­el too seri­ous­ly for care­less off-the-cuff­ness, but it also feels like an off­shoot of a more clas­si­cal, cod­i­fied approach to star­dom than our spon­ta­neous­ly con­fes­sion­al age, all snapchats and self­ies and embar­rass­ing­ly emo­ji-laden tweets, tends to pro­mote. There’s a rea­son why there aren’t too many Den­zel Wash­ing­ton memes, and it can’t be that he’s nev­er looked sad while eat­ing a sandwich.

Theres a reason why there arent many Denzel Washington memes, and it cant be that hes never looked sad eating a sandwich.

Movie jour­nal­ists and film com­men­ta­tors have tried to define the essence of Washington’s star­dom. Film his­to­ri­an Cyn­thia Baron, who lit­er­al­ly wrote the book on Wash­ing­ton (part of the BFI Star Stud­ies’ series), invokes a new kind of Hol­ly­wood star­dom [that] no longer requires a link with white­ness.” But Baron also relates Washington’s pio­neer­ing achieve­ments to a cin­e­mat­ic tra­di­tion of yore, sum­mon­ing Bill Bojan­gles” Robin­son, Fred Astaire and Cary Grant as com­par­i­son points. Sim­i­lar­ly, in 2014, Variety’s Brent Lang wrote an arti­cle titled Why Den­zel Wash­ing­ton May Be the Last Pure Movie Star.’ Its tone is whol­ly admir­ing but it doesn’t take a genius to extrap­o­late a down­side to being described as such: that the era in which his star per­sona nat­u­ral­ly fits is passing.

So Wash­ing­ton is both pio­neer and throw­back, both the first and the last. And that’s some­thing he is aware of. Talk­ing to The Guardian in 2013, he said, Being African-Amer­i­can, there were no big movie stars to hang out with any­way, not when I was start­ing out, they were just the third guy from the back! For what­ev­er rea­son, I nev­er befriend­ed any white actors.” It sounds like a lone­ly posi­tion to be in, a star forg­ing his own path just slight­ly ahead of the wave that would fol­low soon after. Tim­ing is every­thing, and Wash­ing­ton was pick­ing up his first Oscar (an obvi­ous mark­er for main­stream accep­tance) for the Ed Zwick-direct­ed, white-medi­at­ed 1989 film Glo­ry, just a few months after future col­lab­o­ra­tor Spike Lee released black cin­e­ma touch­point Do The Right Thing, and around a year before John Singleton’s Boyz N The Hood hit screens. With no star­dom tem­plate to fol­low, it’s hard­ly sur­pris­ing that Wash­ing­ton con­trolled his pub­lic image so care­ful­ly. Which also means that inter­view­ers often seem unpre­pared for the frank, force­ful Wash­ing­ton that occa­sion­al­ly shows up. Roger Ebert inter­viewed him around the time of his out­stand­ing turn in Mal­colm X and wrote warm­ly that, What was sur­pris­ing for me, talk­ing to him, was how polit­i­cal he was – how will­ing to con­tin­ue the dis­cus­sion that Mal­colm X begins in the film.” Yet in that same inter­view Wash­ing­ton claims, I don’t speak for my work; I like to let my work speak for me.”

More recent­ly, in that 2013 Guardian piece, Xan Brooks makes a point of stress­ing the dis­con­nect between the Flight-era Wash­ing­ton he meets – talk­ing up a bliz­zard, he’s talk­ing to keep warm; spout­ing off in great, rous­ing, charm­ing gusts,” and the Wash­ing­ton he prob­a­bly expect­ed, a megas­tar by any stan­dard, yet one who you could prob­a­bly walk past […] in the street with­out so much as a back­ward glance.” Again, even there, the inter­view ends with Wash­ing­ton, hav­ing effort­less­ly charmed and dis­armed with the full force of his per­son­al mag­net­ism, call­ing out as an after­thought: What’s a celebri­ty any­way? Paris Hilton’s a celebri­ty. I’m just a work­ing actor.”

Read more in LWLies 66: The Mag­nif­i­cent Sev­en issue

So what does the work say about Den­zel Wash­ing­ton? On the one hand his fil­mog­ra­phy pro­motes the idea of him as a star of rare integri­ty: can you think of any oth­er A‑lister with­out a sin­gle sequel or fran­chise to his name? (Even if that changes with The Equal­iz­er 2, it was an unprece­dent­ed 35-year streak). Even Tom Han­ks, whose own fame and like­able every­man per­sona prob­a­bly most close­ly cor­re­late to a white ver­sion” of Washington’s, has gone back to the Da Vin­ci Code well a cou­ple of times now and has voiced three Toy Sto­ry movies. Wash­ing­ton hasn’t ever gone the fam­i­ly film route, has nev­er voiced a fea­ture ani­ma­tion and, in the years since Car­bon Copy, has appeared in exact­ly two come­dies: The Preacher’s Wife from 1996 and 1990’s for­got­ten, racial­ly- moti­vat­ed organ trans­plant farce, Heart Condition.

What makes Washington’s star­dom so unusu­al is that, for bet­ter or worse, it is pred­i­cat­ed on the kind of grown-up dra­mas peo­ple like to com­plain that Hol­ly­wood doesn’t make any­more. And unlike, say, erst­while co-star Samuel L Jack­son, Wash­ing­ton does not take sup­port­ing roles in big-bud­get block­busters: he’d rather lead a small­er film. This sets lim­its. Wash­ing­ton has nev­er been a huge mon­ey- spin­ner in the man­ner of Tom Cruise – only five of his films have made more than $100m in the US, and his best per­former – Rid­ley Scott’s Amer­i­can Gang­ster – tapped out at $130m domestically.

It has also proven some­thing of a cre­ative lim­i­ta­tion. Out­side of the four films Wash­ing­ton has made with Spike Lee, and a hand­ful of oth­ers that dis­tin­guish them­selves for oth­er rea­sons, there are an awful lot of rather samey filler titles: Ric­o­chet, 2 Guns, Vir­tu­os­i­ty, John Q, Out of Time, The Book of Eli, The Pel­i­can Brief, The Tak­ing of Pel­ham 123, Deja Vu, The Bone Col­lec­tor… Some of those films are pret­ty good for what they are, but mem­o­rable star vehi­cles they are not. The inex­plic­a­bly pop­u­lar Man on Fire is prob­a­bly the par­a­digm there, but those traits car­ry all the way up to 2014’s The Equal­iz­er and, prob­a­bly, beyond.

The heavy-lift­ing, capital‑P per­for­mances can most­ly be found in the oth­er strand of Washington’s career to date: the por­traits of real-life his­tor­i­cal fig­ures. From anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko in Cry Free­dom to Ruben Hur­ri­cane’ Carter in The Hur­ri­cane and fic­tion­alised Pvt Trip in Glo­ry to anti­hero Frank Lucas in Amer­i­can Gang­ster, these are the turns that estab­lished his prac­ti­cal­ly trade­marked rep­u­ta­tion as one of the best actors of his gen­er­a­tion. But they also sug­gest he’s one of the most clas­si­cal, to the point of old-fash­ioned, as they all belong to the inspi­ra­tional true-life sto­ry” cat­e­go­ry that has, for so long, been the Hol­ly­wood establishment’s idea of accept­able pres­tige. Add to that heady mix the slight­ly anom­alous Oscar win for the more gener­ic Train­ing Day, and you have a good idea of the bulls­eye area of his main­stream appeal.

Two oval portraits of men in sepia tones. One portrait shows Alonzo Harris, the other shows Dr. Jerome Davenport. The portraits have a vintage illustration style.

Like many mas­ter­pieces, Spike Lee’s Mal­colm X was not imme­di­ate­ly recog­nised as such. And maybe it’s to be expect­ed that the (pre­dom­i­nant­ly white, if it needs to be said again) estab­lish­ment would have a hard time whol­ly embrac­ing a biopic of the most divi­sive of black icons, com­ing from the out­spo­ken direc­tor of the pow­der keg street opera, Do the Right Thing. But while the epic yet humane scope of Lee’s achieve­ment might have tak­en some time to sink in, Washington’s Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed per­for­mance was laud­ed straight away. And he is unmis­tak­ably bril­liant, from his wolfish grin and Rufus T Fire­fly walk dur­ing the riotous, zoot-suit­ed qua­si-musi­cal open­ing, to the con­vinc­ing por­tray­al of X’s reli­gious con­ver­sion and sub­se­quent rad­i­cal­i­sa­tion as part of the Nation of Islam, to the even­tu­al, qui­eter rev­e­la­tions after his trip to Mecca.

It was also a kind of unspo­ken rebuke to the oth­er, bet­ter-known side of his star per­sona. As Ash­ley Clark, writ­ing for The Guardian, put it: Lee’s film was a pow­er­ful state­ment against an enter­tain­ment cul­ture which rou­tine­ly pri­ori­tised the expe­ri­ence of white sav­iours in civ­il rights nar­ra­tives (see: Cry Free­dom, Mis­sis­sip­pi Burn­ing), or sweet­ened the bit­ter pill with sooth­ing depic­tions of inter­ra­cial friend­ships (The Long Walk Home).”

And yet, even while they may not have been the film’s pri­ma­ry audi­ence, Washington’s per­for­mance human­is­es Mal­colm X for white Amer­i­can view­ers too. In his skilled, mul­ti­fac­eted turn, Mal­colm is nei­ther the infal­li­ble idol his sup­port­ers saw nor the crazy-mir­ror boogey­man ver­sion of Mar­tin Luther King Jr that main­stream cul­ture was coached to view him as. Wash­ing­ton ren­ders Mal­colm X as a man, and if it isn’t his absolute great­est per­for­mance, it very well might be his most last­ing­ly important.

In a just world, the sadly underrated Devil in a Blue Dress would have kicked off Washingtons first franchise.

Lee didn’t only get one great per­for­mance out of Wash­ing­ton, he got four. Their col­lab­o­ra­tions – Mal­colm X, Mo’ Bet­ter Blues, He Got Game and Inside Man – amount to a sep­a­rate sub-cat­e­go­ry of excel­lence with­in Washington’s exten­sive cat­a­logue. Maybe it’s because oth­er reg­u­lar col­lab­o­ra­tors like Tony Scott and Antoine Fuqua, employ Wash­ing­ton as a star, where­as Lee employs him as an actor. The char­ac­ters por­trayed in each of Lee’s films do not fit the mould of the man’s‑gotta-do arche­type Wash­ing­ton plays over and over again elsewhere.

This is per­haps best exem­pli­fied by his per­fect­ly nuanced turn as the con­vict father try­ing, and large­ly fail­ing, to con­nect with his son for rea­sons both noble and igno­ble in the tremen­dous He Got Game (this one might well be his actu­al great­est per­for­mance). Lee is one of the few direc­tors to give him roles that do not rely on his charis­ma – in fact they require him to tamp it down in ser­vice of a deep­er truth about real, con­vinc­ing­ly bro­ken men. It’s that approach that makes Mal­colm X feel less like a hagiog­ra­phy than a sym­pa­thet­ic eye-lev­el account of his­to­ry as lived by peo­ple, not icons.

And it lends even their most com­mer­cial film, Inside Man, the tex­ture and sly wit of a char­ac­ter piece, dis­guised as a fun cat-and-mouse heist thriller. Wash­ing­ton seems to trust Lee with nar­ra­tives in which his char­ac­ter los­es in a way he per­haps doesn’t with any oth­er direc­tor. Telling­ly, his two biggest regrets, as he told GQ in 2012, are turn­ing down two films that pre­sent­ed a sim­i­lar­ly more com­plex idea of win­ning’ and los­ing’ than the more gener­ic fare he often accepts: the Brad Pitt role in David Fincher’s hor­ror-thriller Se7en and the George Clooney role in cor­po­rate psy­chodra­ma Michael Clay­ton. Of the lat­ter he admit­ted frankly, It was the best mate­r­i­al I had read in a long time, but I was ner­vous about a first-time direc­tor, and I was wrong. It happens.”

And the four Lee films are not the only notable out­liers in Washington’s fil­mog­ra­phy. There was his gen­uine­ly dif­fi­cult role as the homo­pho­bic lawyer in Jonathan Demme’s Philadel­phia which Tom Han­ks right­ly said, real­ly put his film image at risk.” His two films with direc­tor Carl Franklin, Out of Time and Dev­il in a Blue Dress, also show­cased a dif­fer­ent con­cep­tion of Washington’s appeal: a sleazier, sex­i­er side, involv­ing prob­a­bly the most graph­ic sex scenes the usu­al­ly clean-cut star ever engaged in. In a just world, the sad­ly under­rat­ed Dev­il in a Blue Dress would have kicked off Washington’s first fran­chise: the Easy Rawl­ins books by Wal­ter Mosley were ready and wait­ing and nev­er had Wash­ing­ton (and indeed Don Chea­dle as Mouse) more per­fect­ly slid into a character.

In a very bril­liant Lit­er­ary Hub piece on Harp­er Lee’s chang­ing lega­cy, Kate Jenk­ins says that, some­time between the pub­li­ca­tion of To Kill a Mock­ing­bird’ and, let’s say, the inven­tion of Twit­ter, white Amer­i­cans got the strange idea that ours was a post-racial” soci­ety.” Wash­ing­ton became a star dur­ing this era and his star­dom, which has been remark­able for its con­sis­ten­cy and unchange­abil­i­ty over decades of cease­less work, feels like part of that post-racial dream. But we now live in Go Set a Watch­man’ times, when the com­fort­ing pater­nal­ism of Atti­cus Finch is revealed to have been a kind of con­de­scend­ing racism all along and when the very term post-racial” is most usu­al­ly accom­pa­nied by the word myth”.

Wash­ing­ton did an amaz­ing, unequalled job of becom­ing a Hol­ly­wood star (which, let’s not for­get, is a main­stream – read white – con­struct) when the odds were wild­ly stacked against him. Rather like the Gin­ger Rogers para­dox” for women (Rogers did every­thing her bet­ter-paid co-star Fred Astaire did, only back­wards and in heels), in order to achieve an equiv­a­lent lev­el of fame and influ­ence, Wash­ing­ton had not only to be bet­ter at his job than most of his white coun­ter­parts, he had to be per­son­al­ly unim­peach­able on every lev­el: God-fear­ing, moral­ly incor­rupt­ible, unques­tion­ably respectable, a paragon of virtue. And that’s from a main­stream perspective.

From the point of view of his stand­ing with­in his own com­mu­ni­ty, the stakes were even high­er. As Chris Rock put it, being famous as a black guy is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent than being famous as a white guy. Tom Han­ks is an amaz­ing actor, but Den­zel Wash­ing­ton is a god to his peo­ple. He has a respon­si­bil­i­ty to his peo­ple that Tom Cruise, Liam Nee­son, all these guys don’t have. They just make their art.”

Wash­ing­ton suc­cess­ful­ly nego­ti­at­ed all that for decades, with a grace that, to a casu­al observ­er, could eas­i­ly seem so effort­less as to be prac­ti­cal­ly trans­par­ent. But now that he has set his mark on Hol­ly­wood his­to­ry as sure­ly as his hand­prints have been immor­talised in cement out­side the Chi­nese The­atre in LA (extreme left of the entrance, between Dan­ny Glover, Wal­ter Matthau, Michael Keaton, Susan Saran­don and Oskar Wern­er, if you’re curi­ous) he has license, if he wants it, to change, to exper­i­ment, maybe even to sub­vert his image – to give audi­ences black and white more oppor­tu­ni­ties to say (as he told The Tele­graph in 2013), we haven’t seen Den­zel like that.”

He can take immense pride and is owed a mas­sive debt of grat­i­tude for tak­ing on the man­tle of the last pure movie star” with such intel­li­gence and integri­ty. But it would be excit­ing now to see him evolve into the first of some­thing else – to see Den­zel Wash­ing­ton, at 61, re-rede­fine what it means to be Hollywood’s bright­est black star.

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