One of the things I love most about all of the Gladiator II promotion is that it feels like everyone is acknowledging that, oh right, Denzel Washington is the greatest actor of his generation. Not only that, but he’s one of the most exciting actors of any generation, constantly pushing himself to take on wildly different roles and challenges. Denzel is getting the full GOAT treatment. As Esquire notes, “He has lived a big life. Tough streets, close calls, a wife of forty-one years, four kids, fifty movies, two Oscars, three Equalizers.” Amazing. He turns 70 years old just after Christmas too. What a life, what an actor. Some highlights from Esquire’s cover story, “Denzel: A Legend In His Own Words.”

He’s no gangster: “Those characters I played in Training Day, in American Gangster—it might look like they were close to me, and I could tell you they were, but I wasn’t no gangster. I ran with them real gangsters down there, but I was not them. So let me not tell that lie to you. I had one foot in the streets, but I ain’t no killer. I can’t think of a single role where I would say, Man, that’s me. Entirely me? No, no. First of all, they’re lines that you read and you learn, and that’s how that person talks. Sure, there has to be pieces of what you’ve done in who you are, and hopefully there’s pieces of who you are in what you’ve done.”

His father: “He worked. His father, my grandfather, was a farmer. Here’s a fact: We’re descendants of George Washington. We’re ex-slaves. My sister did the whole genealogical history of our family. She is truly a genius. She’s good, and she spent forever figuring it all out. We still own land down there—not far from D. C. Come on. Our last name’s Washington. Do the math.”

He’s a man of faith: “When you see me, you see the best I could do with what I’ve been given by my lord and savior. I’m unafraid. I don’t care what anyone thinks. See, talking about the fear part of it—you can’t talk like that and win Oscars. You can’t talk like that and party. You can’t say that in this town. I’m free now. It’s not talked about in this town. It’s not talked about. It’s not talked about. It’s not fashionable. It’s not sexy. But that doesn’t mean people in Hollywood don’t believe. There’s no such thing called Hollywood anyway. What does that even mean? That to me means a street called Hollywood Boulevard. It’s not like we all meet somewhere and discuss what we believe. So I don’t know how many other actors have faith. I didn’t do no poll. How would I find that out? I mean, there’s no Church Actor Meetings I’ve been to.”

He doesn’t have many actor friends: “I don’t have a lot of actor friends. Family friends, sure, like Sam Jackson. His wife and Pauletta go way back, and he and I go all the way back to A Soldier’s Play, in 1981. But now, when I make a movie, I’m not trying to make friends. We wrap, I’m trying to go home. That’s not to say that if I see, I don’t know, Tom Hanks, it’s not great—it is! I love Tom Hanks. I just don’t see him. I didn’t see him much before Philadelphia, either. We’re in the same business but not necessarily the same town at any moment. Just the way it goes.”

When he lost the Oscar to Kevin Spacey in 2000: “I think I had won the Golden Globe for Hurricane—see, I barely remember now, ain’t that crazy? But then at the Oscars, they called Kevin Spacey’s name for American Beauty. I have a memory of turning around and looking at him, and nobody was standing but the people around him. And everyone else was looking at me.
Not that it was this way. Maybe that’s the way I perceived it. Maybe I felt like everybody was looking at me. Because why would everybody be looking at me? Thinking about it now, I don’t think they were. I’m sure I went home and drank that night. I had to. I don’t want to sound like, Oh, he won my Oscar, or anything like that. It wasn’t like that. And you know, there was talk in the town about what was going on over there on that side of the street, and that’s between him and God. I ain’t got nothing to do with that. I pray for him. That’s between him and his maker.”

He stopped voting for the Oscars after he lost to Spacey: “I went through a time then when Pauletta would watch all the Oscar movies—I told her, I don’t care about that. Hey: They don’t care about me? I don’t care. You vote. You watch them. I ain’t watching that. I gave up. I got bitter. My pity party. So I’ll tell you, for about fifteen years, from 1999 to 2014 when I put the beverage down, I was bitter. I don’t even know offhand what movies I made then—I guess John Q, Manchurian Candidate. But I didn’t know I was bitter.

He drank a lot during that time: “Wine is very tricky. It’s very slow. It ain’t like, boom, all of a sudden. And part of it was we built this big house in 1999 with a ten-thousand-bottle wine cellar, and I learned to drink the best. So I’m gonna drink my ’61s and my ’82s and whatever we had. Wine was my thing, and now I was popping $4,000 bottles just because that’s what was left. And then later in those years I’d call Gil Turner’s Fine Wines & Spirits on Sunset Boulevard and say, Send me two bottles, the best of this or that. And my wife’s saying, Why do you keep ordering just two? I said, Because if I order more, I’ll drink more. So I kept it to two bottles, and I would drink them both over the course of the day.”

He’s clean now: “I’ve done a lot of damage to the body. We’ll see. I’ve been clean. Be ten years this December. I stopped at sixty and I haven’t had a thimble’s worth since. Things are opening up for me now—like being seventy. It’s real. And it’s okay. This is the last chapter—if I get another thirty, what do I want to do? My mother made it to ninety-seven. I’m doing the best I can. And not only alcohol—forget all that. Strength. About two years ago my good friend, my little brother, Lenny Kravitz, said, D, I wanna hook you up with a trainer. And he did, and he’s another man of God. I started with him February of last year. He makes the meals for me and we’re training, and I’m now 190-something pounds on my way to 185. I was looking at pictures of myself and Pauletta at the Academy Awards for Macbeth, and I’m just looking fat, with this dyed hair, and I said, Those days are over, man. I feel like I’m getting strong. Strong is important.

[From Esquire]

I’m glad he survived all of the drinking and bitterness and he has looked markedly different in the past decade since he got sober – you can just tell that he’s sharper, his life has more focus, he looks leaner and more open and observant. The stuff about losing to Spacey and the rumors about Spacey even then… that’s interesting. Throughout the piece, Denzel also acknowledges fully that Pauletta raised their four kids – while he was around and he tried to be more present than his father was, he says repeatedly that Pauletta raised the kids and he’s so proud of how she raised them. Amazing.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, cover courtesy of Esquire.