DENZEL Washington is proud of his four children who are achievers in their own right. Ruben V. Nepales
LOS ANGELES – Let’s just say that if you watch Denzel Washington’s “The Equalizer,” you won’t look at the rakes, water hoses and brooms in a hardware store the same way again. Playing a supposedly regular employee in a store that looks like Home Depot, Denzel comes up with creative ways to use everyday household tools to “equalize” people who brutalize the helpless.
The A-list star does occasionally go to the hardware store, but now he knows the “alternative” uses of seemingly harmless products. “I picked up some Super Glue the other day,” said Denzel in this recent chat. “You could glue somebody’s eyes shut.” He’s very casually dressed in a loose black T-shirt and pants, perfect to wear to the places we were discussing as a result of watching “The Equalizer”—hardware stores and supermarkets.
“I got some batteries. You could throw them [at someone]. You get to that place making the movie,” he said. Robert McCall, his character, is a methodical man who keenly observes what things around him he can use as weapons to decimate the bad guys. And all in a few carefully-timed minutes. He always triumphs. Like FPJ’s action heroes, McCall is—walang kamatayan (indestructible).
“You throw somebody off by throwing some water at him. You could throw things at him—phones and clocks—or hit them with a glass.”
A trip to a hardware store before filming began was “educational,” Denzel related. “As Antoine (Fuqua, director) and the stunt guys walked around the store—the stunt coordinator was a Navy SEAL—they pointed at many types of tactics. Like—this one wasn’t in the script—they said you can pour the sand down so you can tell when someone’s walking up. Once we got to the actual set in Boston, there were all kinds of ideas…”
In real life, Denzel is not an ace with tools. “My brother can take a car apart and put it back together,” the actor pointed out. “He can fix anything. I can’t put a screw into the wall. All I can do is call somebody. I’ve never had the patience.”
Organized chaos
CHLOE GRACE Moretz plays an abused prostitute who finds a savior in McCall, the character Denzel Washington portrays in Columbia Pictures’ “The Equalizer.”
Instead, Denzel enjoys picking the perfect tomatoes in the supermarket. He says, chuckling, “People are like, ‘What are you doing here?’ I’m like, ‘I got my list.’ I’m squeezing tomatoes. It’s good therapy. My wife (Pauletta) is getting back to her singing career. We now have a home in New York as well. She’s spending more and more time [on the road as a singer], which means sometimes I have to fend for myself. I’m like, wait a minute, there’s no food… so I started going to the market. I like it. I like making my list.”
At home, Denzel stressed, he’s not at all like his very organized character. “I don’t think about control and I am not tidy,” he admitted. “[But] I know where everything is; it’s organized chaos.”
Grinning, he volunteered, “It doesn’t bother me that my underwear is on the floor. It bothers my wife but I like them there. I don’t mind taking off my sweat pants right by the bed because I know when I get up they’re right there.”
He added, still smiling, “I don’t know why I can’t wash my hands at a particular sink. My wife makes me go over to the other sink. I’m like, ‘What’s wrong with this sink?’ She says, ‘Because we wash the dishes on that sink.’ Well, the dishes are dirty when you wash them. Why can’t I wash my hands there? No, I am not neat. I’m a slob. I don’t fold my napkins like Robert McCall does.”
“A kind of a lonely man,” was how Denzel described McCall, a man with a mysterious past trying to start anew. But when he meets a young girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) exploited and brutalized by Russian gangsters, you know what will happen next.
“He’s not some superhero,” Denzel emphasized. “He has certain skills and a certain past… I think part of the reason that people like him, or want to follow him, is that maybe, in some way, they see themselves in him.”
Denzel declared, “If each one of us looked out for one person, we wouldn’t need equalizers.” He brought up the plight of Chloe Grace’s character, Teri, a battered young prostitute. “It makes you wonder about… what has happened to this girl. Where is her family? How did she get in this situation?”
Preeminent
At 59, Denzel is one of Hollywood’s top actors, and the preeminent African-American actor, who’s likewise much-admired as a man. It started in 1981, when he did the play “When the Chickens Come Home to Roost,” he recounted. “I played Malcolm X in a small theater (off-Broadway) that held about 150, 175 people. The word got out about this play and my performance, and it got to be where 500, 1,000 people a night were trying to buy tickets.”
He watched the commotion from a distance. “I was across the street in a park, just taking a five-minute break before I went to work. I was watching the queue, going, ‘Man, something is changing in my life.’”
He remains appreciative of the public’s admiration. “The love [of the fans] is great. I can’t always go to the market to shop. Your world closes in on you because of your success. I’m not knocking it. An old West Indian woman said this to me, ‘When you pray for rain, you got to deal with the mud, too.’ But eventually, good things grow out of that mud so this is my life, this is what it is.”
Collaborative effort
The cheering at red carpet events energizes him. “It says I’m doing a good job. People appreciate what I do. I don’t take it much further than that. We’re all blessed with different talents. When I make a movie, I’m the one in front of the camera but I’m not any more important than the guy or the woman who’s filming me. It’s a collaborative effort.”
Asked if he would consider playing franchise heroes in tight clothes, Denzel answered, “I deal with what’s on the page, not what kind of clothes the character is wearing. If there’s a script that I like and it’s a great role and he wears tight pants, we’ll talk about it.”
But no one has asked. Again breaking into a grin, Denzel cracked, “Sam Jackson’s got it all locked up. He’s in ‘The Avengers,’ right? And another one (‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’), too, right? I can’t get in. Does he wear tight clothes there?”
In Hollywood terms, Denzel’s 31-year marriage to Pauletta is a record of sorts. “Somebody said the divorce rate is not higher in Hollywood than it is anywhere else,” he clarified. “[But] we’re public figures, so you hear about [stars divorcing] more. Nobody talks about the guy with three lines in the movie getting divorced. There’s some farmer in Nebraska who’s not having a good day, either.”
“It isn’t always easy; probably being away from each other sometimes is good,” he said. “I’m happy that my wife is going back to work because she’s a great talent. When we met, she was doing Broadway show after show. She put her career on hold to have our children and raise them. She’s done a brilliant job. I put my two cents in there, too, but she did the heavy lifting.”
Proud dad
He spoke with pride about his four children. “I have two children who are Ivy Leaguers. One graduated from Penn and is now a young filmmaker. One graduated from Yale and is on a producing track. One, now costarring in an HBO series, played professional football. He graduated from the top African-American college in the country, Morehouse. One graduated from NYU and is a young actress doing a play right now in New York. My wife did a good job.”
“I’m blessed with good genes,” he replied when told that he doesn’t seem to age. “My mother—I should not say her age—is north of 89 but she looks great. My daughter is 26 but looks 13. When I was 30, they were still asking me for my ID.”
He admitted, “I age. The inside’s different. The aches stay longer. I did a documentary about Hank Aaron, the baseball player. Hank talked about how he gets up in the morning and puts his feet on the floor for a minute or two before he gets up. I’m starting to do that more and more. I used to just jump right up and go.”
Asked about the worst gossip he has heard about himself, Denzel quickly replied, “That I died in a skiing accident!” He laughed. “People called and asked, ‘Denzel?’ I was like, ‘Yeah?’ ‘I heard you died.’ Or, ‘Is that you, Denzel?’ They don’t even come up with creative ideas; it’s always a skiing accident. I don’t even ski.”
With relish, he quipped, “I couldn’t have died snowboarding. I was at the hardware store.”
(E-mail the columnist at rvnepales_5585@yahoo.com. Follow him at https://twitter.com/nepalesruben.)