Washington Heights

In a revealing interview, the 52-year-old talks to Tara Brady – in Paris, no less – about his sometimes reluctant rise to the top, and his latest blockbuster-in-the-making, Déjà Vu.
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Even those recently arrived from a distant exoplanet could not, if presented with Denzel Washington, fail to recognise him as a movie star. I’m not suggesting that the hypothetical denizens of the Super-Earth orbiting Gliese 876 have been adding zeros to the actor’s box-office tallies, it’s just that when Denzel Washington walks in a room, one couldn’t mistake him for, say, a bus-driver.

Tall, effortlessly charming and strikingly handsome, should he have been born before the Lumiere brothers, moving pictures would simply have had to be invented sooner. In common with Michelangelo’s David, he possesses features exhibiting a perfect bilaterial symmetry. One man’s Jordan may be another man’s meat, but, as articles in such keenly pseudo-scientifical periodicals as the Readers’ Digest might point out, this means you can actually prove that Denzel Washington is a good-looking chap.
Of course, your trusty film correspondent is far too deep to think about such things. Oh no. I won’t be swayed by glamour. I’m here at the George V in Paris – how jammy is that? – to discuss Mr. Washington’s glittering career, an indomitable resumé spanning multiple Oscars and action heroes and darkly challenging character parts. I’m a proper journalist, I am.
“How you doing?” he smiles, with his dazzling movie-star teeth.
“Meep,” I mumble back, before accidentally curtseying.
Yes. A real woman of substance.
Happily, the 52 year-old is far too professional and, evidently, also far too accustomed to star-struck hacks not to put you at ease sooner rather than later. A few pleasantries on, (“Hey, we’re in Paris so we’re alright”) and I could be speaking with the postman. It may not sound like a big deal, but this unlikely ‘everyman’ quality has proved crucial to Mr. Washington’s onscreen success. We are, alas, all too aware of the traditional representation of black culture in Hollywood cinema. The infatigable Melvin Van Peebles has spoken of an era when African-Americans flocked into cinemas to watch Dooley Wilson’s performance as Sam in Casablanca. In 1942, as Van Peebles has pointed out, it was still groundbreaking to see an ethnic actor attired neither in maid nor butler’s uniform.
With Denzel Washington, however, American cinema seems to have turned a corner. One of the few stars who can easily be identified with or without the surname, if you happen to be a megabucks producer – in this particular instance Jerry Bruckheimer – looking to score an enormous hit, Denzel is likely your first port of call.
Equally adept playing romantic swains (Mississippi Masala), villains (Training Day), military men (Courage Under Fire, The Manchurian Candidate) and action heroes (Man On Fire), he is famed for professionalism and meticulous preparation. He worked out for a year with boxing trainer Terry Claybon before essaying Rubin Carter in Hurricane. He studied forensics for The Bone Collector. He’s hung around enough cops to pass any entrance exam they could sling at him.
He may not be the first black actor to have taken home a statuette from the Academy Awards, but when Sidney Poitier was similarly honoured in 1963 for his role in Lilies Of The Field, he was playing a character defined by race. Though Mr. Washington has engaged with racial themes, most notably in his work with director Spike Lee – He Got Game, Mo’Better Blues and, of course, Malcolm X – his ascendancy indicates that Hollywood is finally capable of being colour blind.
“I don’t know if that’s actually possible,” he says. “I mean, every character I play is racially defined because every character I play is black. I’m an African-American and I have to bring me to the part. It has always been the case that there are bad roles out there, but I think, if you don’t like them then don’t do them. I don’t think it’s that big a deal. I don’t think I’m any kind of pioneer.”
Which shouldn’t be taken as suggesting that Washington is in any way apologetic about his progress to date. On the contrary, his attitude is at once pragmatic and demanding.
“Everybody has choices. I’m old enough to say ‘no’. If other people have to compromise then live with it,” he says. “Everybody is born with the power to say ‘no’. But I’m not happy with the idea that I play roles that are colour-blind. In some way it suggests that I’m better than my colour. I’m always black. I’m going to be black until I die. And I love it.”

His latest role in Déjà Vu is a case in point. A big, glossy, pedal-to-the-floor action film from those reliable merchants of mayhem, Bruckheimer and Tony Scott, 10 years ago the film would surely have arrived with Bruce Willis attached. It’s Denzel’s third outing with Scott the Younger, following Crimson Tide and Man On Fire, and the film zips, glides and zooms through all of the director’s authorial stamps. As Denzel’s New Orleans FBI agent hunts down the murderer of hundreds of sailors and ridiculously cute children, all victims of an attack on a jolly ferry cruise, you immediately start thinking ‘no wonder the movie is called Déjà Vu’. But you’d be wrong. Dead wrong.
Preposterous and preposterously entertaining, Déjà Vu represents a whole new bag of tricks. Coaxed by a pudgy Val Kilmer into joining forces with a gaggle of smart-arsed computer geeks, Denzel begins to recreate events with the help of Snow White, a super-dooper surveillance system linked up to seven super-dooper satellites. The programme renders real-time composite images of anything you might wish to see from four days ago, from any angle and through any solid object. Handier still, it actually doubles as a time machine, enabling Denzel to take a temporal trip, catch the right-wing lunatic (Jim Caviezel) responsible and theoretically, save his beautiful quasi-romantic interest (Paula Patton of Idlewild fame) and the world. But how? Hasn’t the notion of wormholes and string theory been superseded by the Loop quantum gravity model? Or something?
“If you say so,” laughs Denzel. “I know. Tony and Jerry had to convince me too. I loved the original screenplay but I needed to know this could work. Tony wanted to steep this in facts about surveillance and what it’s capable of doing. I don’t know about the multi-angles and all of that, but we do have the technology. We all know we can look at somebody’s house with Google Earth and we do have the technology to look through somebody’s house.”
He’s done his homework.
“They use it in Iraq as we speak, where you see a heat signature,” he adds. “By gathering your genetic information, they can identify you as opposed to me. With the bombings in London, they didn’t just use video surveillance. It was more than that. And it worked.”
Significantly, the film is dedicated to the population of New Orleans and is recognisably a post-Katrina movie. The hurricane would hit shortly after production began, but the cast and crew decided to hang on in there anyway. Placards in the opening scene tell us that “Katrina Only Made Us Stronger”, but appalling scenes of a still ravaged city suggest otherwise. I wonder what Denzel made of the place and if he agrees with his old buddy Spike whose scathing assessment of governmental failings can be found in the documentary When The Levees Broke; A Requiem In Four Acts.
“I don’t feel qualified to talk for the people of New Orleans,” he proffers. “When you think about the debate about the Mardi Gras that followed, for example, with outsiders deciding that it wasn’t appropriate to go ahead when it’s not up to them to tell the people of New Orleans how to feel. There was such a tremendous amount of devastation and there’s a long, long road ahead – decades and billions of dollars ahead.”
Will the city ever recover?
“I don’t know if a full recovery is even possible,” he reflects. “Of course, people will get on with their lives and we were happy to invest some money there, but it was only a very, very small thing to do. They wanted us there. They needed people to come back.”
He pauses.
“And I think Spike says it all in his film.”
I’m glad that he’s turned out to be a nice fellow, apparently unaffected by the blandishments of stardom. It makes sense really. Born to a Pentecostal preacher and a beautician, Denzel comes from a good solid background of hard work and what pop psychology books might (I think) call self-actualisation. One never reads any of the usual tittle-tattle about him. He’s been happily married to actress Paulette Pearson for 24 years and is, by all accounts, a good dad to his four children. (He certainly hasn’t fathered any Hollywood brats. At the time of writing, his eldest son John David is playing football for the St. Louis Rams, while daughter Kate is attending Yale University.) Denzel himself is committed to any number of new projects including a sequel to Inside Man, Ridley Scott’s American Gangster and his own sophomore directorial effort The Great Debaters. Does he ever slow down and get tired?
“I don’t know,” he says. “Sometimes it’s something that you want to do. Sometimes it’s a living. Sometimes it’s stuff you have to do to get to where you want to be. But I am bored with acting. Really bored. I’m bored with being in the public eye all the time.”
He laughs.
“I have to find a whole new bag.”
We say goodbye and I walk out to the street where packs of photographers are eagerly waiting his arrival. Hmm. Maybe this mono-name level of stardom isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.