Denzel Washington and director Antoine Fuqua first teamed up for 2021’s “Training Day.” Denzel’s casting in the film caused some controversy, mainly because it was his first time playing a bad guy and certain groups were worried that he’d squander years of goodwill built by playing morally upstanding characters in his numerous projects. But his performance as corrupt LAPD narcotics officer Alonzo Harris proved that no matter what role you put him in, Washington could craft a memorable and beguiling character that, whether good or bad, would stay with audiences long after the credits roll.
13 years after Fuqua helped Washington prove he could play villains just as well as any other character, the duo reunited for a very different type of project. 2014’s “The Equalizer” saw the veteran star playing someone so committed to the idea of doing what’s right that he was willing to commit mass violence in pursuit of maintaining cosmic justice. The film saw Washington play Robert McCall, a former Marine and DIA officer who fulfills that classic action movie archetype of the guy who’s really good at hitting and shooting people but just wants to be left alone. When we first meet McCall he has left his combat days behind him, but is forced to demonstrate his elite skills after teenage girl Teri/Alina (Chloë Grace Moretz) is brutalized by members of the Russian mob. It seems that to play this reluctant avenger, Washington created an unlikely character trait that and in so doing, harkened back to his “Training Day” performance.
Denzel Washington developed his own take on Robert McCall
The “Equalizer” movies, of which there are now three, are based on the 1980s CBS television series of the same name. But Antoine Fuqua’s films chart their own course, creating a very different story for Denzel Washington’s Robert McCall. For one thing, Washington’s version of the character has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which not only wasn’t an aspect of the original series, it wasn’t even in the movie’s script.
When we first meet McCall in 2014’s “The Equalizer,” he’s a Boston-dwelling widower living a quiet life and working in a hardware store. Of course, as things develop he reveals an entirely different side to himself, displaying the kind of combat skills that might even give John Wick a run for his money. While Washington could have approached such an archetypal action character without thinking too much about it, the man brought his characteristic insight to the part, telling the BBC, “The producer wanted the name and basic premise and that was about it. I helped develop the character a bit more.”
It seems one of his biggest contributions to McCall’s character was the obsessive compulsive aspect, a subject Washington began reading about after signing onto the project. The actor told the BBC, “I developed a backstory for myself that whatever it was he used to do — and I’m glad we don’t say — caused an amount of damage or post-traumatic stress. He’s lost his wife — we don’t quite know why — and it manifests itself in this obsessive compulsive behaviour.” That behavior is most obvious in McCall’s use of his watch to time his various takedowns of entire groups of goons. But what’s really interesting about the whole OCD element of McCall’s character is that Washington didn’t tell his director about any it until shooting began.
Denzel Washington surprised his Equalizer director on-set
During shooting for “Training Day” Denzel Washington routinely went off-script and the film was all the better for it. Director Antoine Fuqua seemed to encourage such improvisation, too, having already recruited real gang members to appear in the film and generally wanting things to feel as authentic and spontaneous as possible.
It seems Washington carried on that tradition of adding his own flare to the script with “The Equalizer,” too. Fuqua revealed on the Rich Eisen Show that the actor “came up with the OCD,” adding, “That’s something he just started doing. I didn’t even know.” Explaining how he discovered Washington’s addition to the character of Robert McCall, Fuqua said:
“[Denzel] wanted a napkin, he wanted a cup, and we were sitting there in the first [film] in the coffee shop and he just started doing it and I just let the camera roll, I just started capturing it. It became part of that character, so there’s something about Robert McCall that Denzel really responds to and you’d have to ask him what that is.”
Fuqua likened this moment to the time Washington added his famous “King Kong” line to Alonzo’s final speech during the climax of “Training Day” — another entirely improvised moment that caught the director off-guard. Washington carried on this tradition on the set of “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” too. Whether he tried it with his “Gladiator II” character remains unconfirmed but it would surely have rubbed notorious grump Ridley Scott the wrong way, so hopefully we’ll hear some stories about Denzel Washington springing some wild improv on the director in the near future.