Denzel Washington was bitter for 15 years about losing a sure-fire Oscar: “I went home and drank that night”
The actor reflects on the Oscar loss that unsettled him for years, his struggles with resentment and drinking, and the long road to letting go.
Denzel Washington is one of Hollywood’s towering actors of our time, and he didn’t have to wait long to pick up his first Oscar for his role in Glory in 1990.
But it took more than a decade for him to receive his second statue for Training Day, a delay that filled him with bitterness for years. He had been certain his second Oscar would come earlier, specifically forThe Hurricane– but it didn’t. In a recent interview with Esquire while promoting Gladiator 2, his latest project, he admitted that on that night “I went home and drank.”
Denzel Washington’s fall due to ‘Hurricane Carter’
Not winning the Oscar for The Hurricane weighed on him for a long time and even sparked an uncomfortable moment at the 2000 Academy Awards ceremony.
“I think I had won the Golden Globe for The Hurricane. See? I barely remember now – isn’t that crazy? But then, at the Oscars, they said Kevin Spacey’s name for American Beauty. I remember I turned and looked at him, and nobody was standing except the people around him.
“Everyone else was looking at me. Maybe that’s how I perceived it. Why would they all be looking at me? Thinking back now, I don’t think they were…,” he said.
Washington had expected to win the Oscar for best actor for playing Rubin “The Hurricane” Carter in the biopic of the same name, but the award went to Kevin Spacey. Washington didn’t take it well that night. “I’m sure I went home and drank that night. I had to. I don’t want to sound like I’m saying, ‘Oh, he won my Oscar’ or anything like that. It wasn’t that.” His turmoil with the Academy didn’t stop there.
“I went through a period where Pauletta [his wife] watched all the Oscar movies. I’d tell her I didn’t care. They don’t care about me? I don’t care. Vote, watch them. I don’t watch them. I gave up. I got bitter. I felt sorry for myself. So I’ll tell you that for about fifteen years, from 1999 to 2014, when I quit drinking, I was bitter. I don’t even know what movies I made then – I guess John Q, The Manchurian Candidate… But I didn’t know I was bitter,” he concluded.
Even so, in 2002 he would win his second Oscar for Training Day, although it seems that it wasn’t enough consolation...
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