Denzel Washington is looking back at his wins and losses.
While reflecting on his decades-long career in a rare interview with Esquire, the Gladiator II star opened up about loosing the Oscar in 2000 to Kevin Spacey.
Washington was nominated in the Best Actor category for The Hurricane, in which he played the role of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a man whose dreams of winning the middleweight boxing title were destroyed when he was arrested along with another man for the murders of 3 people in a New Jersey bar.
While the part was gripping, and still considered one of the great performances of his career, the Academy Award ultimately went to Spacey for his portrayal of Lester Burnham in American Beauty.
And though in the moment it was a tough loss for Washington, who said he’s “sure he went home and drank that night,” he has a unique perspective on the situation now, more than 20 years on.
“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,'” Washington said, seemingly referring to the sexual misconduct allegations leveled against Spacey. “I ain’t got nothing to do with that. I pray for him. That’s between him and his maker.”
Touching on the topic of his drinking, Washington didn’t just drink in the down times, he drank during the joyous ones too — and that’s when things got “tricky” for the now 69-year-old actor.
“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,” Washington recalled. “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.”
Washington says he never drank while he was working or preparing for a role, however.
“I would clean up, go back to work — I could do both. However many months of shooting, bang, it’s time to go. Then, boom. Three months of wine, then time to go back to work,” he told the outlet.
And while he did drink consistently, the Training Day alum was able to manage his “vices.”
“I never got strung out on heroin. Never got strung out on coke. Never got strung out on hard drugs. I shot dope just like they shot dope, but I never got strung out. And I never got strung out on liquor,” Washington said. “I had this ideal idea of wine tastings and all that — which is what it was at first. And that’s a very subtle thing. I mean, I drank the best. I drank the best.”
Washington ultimately got sober nearly ten years ago, and it was his desire to live a long, healthy life like his late mother did, that inspired him make a change.
“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,” he shared. “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.”
He’s even gotten himself a trainer, thanks to longtime friend, Lenny Kravitz and says he’s “getting strong.”
“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,” Washington recalled. “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.”
As for what else he counts as important, it’s not the accolades or the infamy — it’s the four children he shares with his wife of more than four decades, Pauletta.
“[W]hen I think of what I’m proudest of, anything I’ve accomplished doesn’t even come to mind. It’s our children: They’re good people,” he said. They know right from wrong. What else can you ask for, you know?”
