Denzel Washington has admitted he “got bitter” and “gave up” on the Oscars after he lost to Kevin Spacey in 2000.
The actor had been nominated for a Best Actor award for his performance as Rubin Carter, a former middleweight boxer who was wrongly convicted of a triple murder, in The Hurricane, but was beaten to the prize by Spacey, who won it for playing Lester Burnham, an ad exec who has a midlife crisis in American Beauty.
At that point, Washington had previously been nominated for three Oscars in his career, one of which he’d won: the Best Supporting Actor award for 1990’s Glory. But losing out in 2000 got him down.
“At the Oscars, they called Kevin Spacey’s name for American Beauty,” Washington, 69, told Esquire.
“I have a memory of turning around and looking at him, and nobody was standing but the people around him. And everyone else was looking at me. Not that it was this way. Maybe that’s the way I perceived it.
“Maybe I felt like everybody was looking at me. Because why would everybody be looking at me? Thinking about it now, I don’t think they were.”
“I’m sure I went home and drank that night. I had to,” he continued, adding: “I went through a time then when [my wife] Pauletta would watch all the Oscar movies – I told her, ‘I don’t care about that. Hey, they don’t care about me? I don’t care,’” Washington said.
“You vote. You watch them. I ain’t watching that. I gave up. I got bitter. My pity party.”
Washington went on to win his first Best Actor Oscar for Training Day in 2002, and he has gone on to secure four more Academy Award nominations since then.
It’s yet to be seen whether he will earn a nomination for Gladiator II, out in cinemas now, in which he plays Macrinus, a former slave who’s amassed great wealth.
The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey gave the new film four stars, writing: “Ridley Scott’s belated sequel has sharks, monkeys, and Denzel Washington doing some tremendous sleeve acting. At times, this is even pure camp.”
