How to stop Denzel Washington stealing your scene, according to Ethan Hawke
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Your support makes all the difference.“You remember your senior year of high school, like the last month when you’re walking through the halls and you don’t give a shit what anybody thinks about you, it’s a great feeling right? That’s how Denzel walks through life.”
It’s a nice analogy from Ethan Hawke on Denzel’s acting (and by all accounts real life) persona, and was very much on his mind ahead of filming on 2001's Training Day.
Denzel can dominate a scene like no other - the man has charisma, presence, humour and aggression for days - so how do you star opposite him without being chewed up and spat out? How does your character stand his or her ground?
Hawke was asked this during a podcast interview with Marc Maron, revealing that he watched back some of the actor’s performances like a football player would another’s game, and offering some counter-intuitive but useful acting advice.
“Denzel, to my mind, is one of the greatest actors of our era,” he said, “you know, it’s a hurricane, it’s a thunderstorm, trying to keep your composure and create with him is hard because he’s a real powerful force.
“I studied his movies before I did Training Day because I just love his acting but I really noticed that he kind of blew everybody off the screen he worked with, except Gene Hackman. So I was like ‘okay it’s is clear that Gene is not playing Denzel’s game and Denzel is not playing Gene’s,’ and I just challenged myself [Maron interjects: “You’re watching game footage!”] - yeah that’s how I felt, I thought alright the trick is just not to care if this guy likes me.
“I don’t wanna go to the Lakers game with him, I don’t wanna go out to dinner with him, I don’t wanna be best friends with him…I’m just gonna do my job. And he worked hard to get me that part [but] I knew that I just had to come on and not care if he liked what I was doing or not.”
He went on to warn against over-rehearsing, or even rehearsing at all.
"The trap with other actors often is that, if you’re doing what they want you to do, what you’re doing is making it easy for them. And if you’re making it easy for them what you’re doing is decreasing sparks. You know, people have this idea about running lines with your scene partner, I hate doing that because I don’t wanna get some habitual, reheated performance, I want to have an actual creative act that you’re witnessing and which is going to be interesting to watch.
"So this idea that if you’re making your scene partner happy you’re doing a good job, I don’t think so, I think that you want to have conflict."
You can listen to the podcast in full here.
The first trailer for Fences dropped today, which sees Washington give another intense performance.
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