Trending:
Over more than four decades, Denzel Washington has played a series of strong, stoic characters with quiet intensity and unshakeable dignity, both on screen and on stage. He doesn’t often let us see him cry.
But like the rest of us, the man who has stepped into the shoes of such iconic real and fictional characters as Stephen Biko, Malcolm X, Rubin Carter, Macbeth and Othello can be moved to tears by cinematic artistry. In the new two-part Apple TV+ documentary Number One on the Call Sheet, Washington, 70, recalls one memorable moment when he was overcome with emotion in the darkness of a movie theater.
And no, he wasn’t watching your everyday tear-jerker.
“I cried a little bit when I saw Black Panther,” Washington says of the 2018 blockbuster film starring Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan and directed by Ryan Coogler. “I was on Broadway [in The Iceman Cometh], in fact, and I went to the premiere, and I wasn’t interested in the red carpet and all that.”
“So I went backstage and I saw Chad and Ryan,” he continues. “I spoke to them and then I sat down and watched the movie. And I felt like the baton had been passed. I was like, ‘Wow, these young boys are gone,’ you know. I felt, I don’t know if the word is ‘relieved,’ but I was proud to see what they had done and seeing where they were headed.”
Washington, an nine-time Oscar nominee for acting with two wins who has starred in such critically acclaimed fare as Malcolm X and The Hurricane, felt like the future of cinema was in good hands. “You know, I didn’t know then they were gonna make a billion dollars, but they did,” he adds. “So that, uh, that was a special moment for me.”
In November, Washington told Australia’s Today show that Coogler is writing a part for him in the upcoming third Black Panther film.
Number One on the Call Sheet, which premiered on March 28, is divided into two sections. Episode 1, “Black Leading Men in Hollywood,” was directed by Reginald Hudlin (House Party, Boomerang) and features interviews with such A-listers as Washington, Eddie Murphy, Morgan Freeman, Will Smith and Jamie Foxx. Episode 2, “Black Leading Women in Hollywood,” directed by Shola Lynch, puts the spotlight on Halle Berry, Angela Bassett, Viola Davis, Gabrielle Union, Cynthia Erivo and Taraji P. Henson, among many others.
In addition to Black Panther‘s Jordan and Bassett, their costar Daniel Kaluuya also appears in the documentary, which pays tribute to the legacy of Boseman, who died in 2020 at age 43 of complications from colon cancer.
“Black Panther for me was, like, the movie that Black people had been waiting for for 100 years,” What’s Love Got to Do with It and The Matrix star Laurence Fishburne, 63, says in the documentary. “Like, for a century, we’ve been waiting for a movie like this. Because you don’t just get one prince in this movie. We got two princes in that movie, with Chad and Michael B.”
“And we never had that before, in cinema,” he adds. “We never had that before. So for me, that was like all of our history, sort of wrapped up and condensed in this wonderful fantasy world of Wakanda. That is born out of our need to have these kinds of heroes and this kind of representation.”
Number One on the Call Sheet is streaming now on Apple TV+.
Read the full article here
