Denzel Washington Wanted to Be a Bad Guy Thanks to Don Cheadle
Actor Denzel Washington has played several characters that he’s proud of. But not even Washington always gets the roles he’d prefer. When he did this film with Don Cheadle, he found himself a bit jealous that Cheadle snagged the much meatier part.
Denzel Washington once wondered why Don Cheadle got to play the bad guy and he didn’t
Nowadays, it’s no surprise to see Washington as a bad guy. Audiences first saw the actor break away from playing the hero all the time in Training Day. Portraying a full-on villain for once was exciting for Washington, who’d been clamoring to play a bad guy for years.
He first time entertained being a villain in the film Devil in a Blue Dress. The movie saw Washington playing the retired war veteran Easy Rawlins who investigates the disappearance of a missing woman. Washington eventually clashes with Don Cheadle’s character in the film, who was playing the unhinged bad guy. When the actor saw Cheadle’s character in motion during the movie, he wished Cheadle’s roles went to him.
“I was talking earlier about Devil in a Blue Dress and that’s when I really realized that Don Cheadle’s character, Mouse… I was like ‘Man, I’m playing the wrong part.’ He’s got the good part and nobody’s ever asked me to play the bad guy. I guess they don’t look at me that way. Maybe they will now,” Washington once said according to UPI.
How Denzel Washington’s age was a concern when acting alongside Don Cheadle
Devil in a Blue Dress was one of Cheadle’s first major pictures. He’d already done Colors prior to the flick, but Dress was where he received more attention than he ever had before. The actor was also young when he was cast as Mouse in the movie. The film’s director Carl Franklin worried that this presented a problem.
“I had had Don in my thesis film at the AFI, so I was aware of him. But the problem was, there’s 10 years’ difference in his and Denzel’s ages,” Franklin said in a 2020 interview with Slate. “Denzel had just come back from … He had this kind of tradition where he and his family would get a yacht with another family, and they would cruise the Mediterranean for summer vacations, with the children and everything. And so he’d come back from vacation, and he had put on some weight. He had a big beard. I just thought, ‘God, the age difference. I just don’t know about that because they’re supposed to be contemporaries.'”
Washington remedied the problem by aging himself down for the movie.
“And Denzel kept saying, ‘Dude, I’m going to be young. Tell him I’m going to be young.’ And when it was time to shoot—he was young. We brought Don up a little bit in age. So he just knocked it out. He was just so good,” Franklin added.
‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ wasn’t the only movie Don Cheadle and Denzel Washington collaborated on
Devil in a Blue Dress wasn’t the last time the pair saw each other. The two would come together again for the 2012 movie Flight, where Washington played an airplane pilot named Whip dealing with alcoholism.
On the surface, Washington’s and Cheadle’s characters in Dress and Flight couldn’t have been anymore different. They both played retired war veterans in the 1995 feature. Whereas in Flight, Cheadle played Washington’s attorney after the latter’s alcoholism resulted in an airplane disaster. Still, Cheadle was able to find some connection between these different roles.
“The protection aspect that Mouse had for Easy that, in a reverse way, my [Flight] character has for Whip in this film,” Cheadle once said according to BlackfilmandTV.
Cheadle found it interesting that in both films his character had to protect Washington’s in a way, although in entirely different circumstances.
