John David Washington ‘Cracked’ Christopher Nolan With This 1 Line in ‘Tenet’
Movie director Christopher Nolan ended up adding casting John David Washington in his 2020 feature Tenet.
Washington had nothing but praise for Nolan, and even managed to catch the filmmaker off guard with a line he came up with.
The John David Washington line that cracked Christopher Nolan
Washington wanted to make sure he did both Nolan and his character justice in his first feature with the filmmaker. The actor played the tormented character The Protagonist, who’s an agent that travels through time to end World War 3. To delve deep into his character’s psyche, Washington maintained a diary of The Protagonist’s thoughts.
“I went very, very detailed. It was little weird things like that. I just love doing that stuff. It’s a lot of fun, and gives me avenues to explore, to maybe inform a scene that isn’t necessarily suggested on the page,” Washington told Complex.
Keeping the diary came in handy, as it helped Washington adlib a line in a scene where The Protagonist was waiting on his hot sauce.
“There was a situation where I got to use ‘hot sauce’ in a Christopher Nolan movie, and I credit that to the diaries. The background research, the development of character. I made it up, but just staying in the zone of The Protagonist helps all those kinds of moments,” he said.
The unexpected line managed to get a rise out of Nolan as well, which was one of the highlights of Washington’s Tenet experience.
“I remember he told me—there wasn’t anything written there, and he basically was like a coach asking a quarterback to make a play. ‘Look I’m going to need you to just make a play. You got to say something.’ I was like ‘What? All right.’ That happened, and I cracked him, so that was a memorable moment for me. Just the fact that I could make Christopher Nolan laugh in a take, and that he actually used it,” Washington recalled.
Christopher Nolan cast John David Washington after seeing him in ‘BlacKkKlansman’
BlacKkKlansman director Spike Lee revealed that Nolan originally got the idea to work with Washington thanks to Lee’s feature. The movie saw Washington playing the first African-Amerian detective in the Colorado Police Department. The Do the Right Thing director sent a personal letter to Nolan through the publication, thanking Nolan for casting Washington.
“Ask him, say, ‘Dear Chris, this is your cinema brother, Spike Lee. I’m looking forward to seeing Tenet, starring the great, great John David Washington. Thank you for casting him and making yourself look good. Thank you for casting him, for hoisting him into the stratosphere,’” Lee wrote to Esquire.
Nolan responded, and corroborated Lee’s claims that BlacKkKlansman put Washington on Nolan’s radar.
“I just felt a sort of magnetism there. It really was an important thing for me in terms of feeling like it was meant to be somehow. In my first conversation with him, he just felt like somebody on the cusp of really great things,” Nolan said.
John David Washington lied to Christopher Nolan about his fear of heights for ‘Tenet’
Washington admitted that he told a little lie to Nolan to clinch his role in Tenet. The actor confided that he had a fear of heights, which presented a slight problem later on during a movie stunt.
“When we were filming in Mumbai, I had to jump over a balcony,” Washington said according to Contact Music. “But my relationship with heights wasn’t great. So it forced me to find some courage and for the love of the art, you jump! So yeah, I loved every other take of that.”
The Ballers star felt that many other actors would do something similar in his position.
“I’m sure most actors have been there. They ask, ‘Can you ride a horse?’ And you’re like,’ Sure, I can ride a horse’. You say yes and get over it later,” he said.
