Press tours can be a bit of a slog for actors, even if there’s a lot of sparkling water and posh hotel rooms. But when John David Washington says “it’s a pleasure to be at a junket”, he really means it. “I had one film [open] during the pandemic and another during the strike, so I’m just happy to be talking about something that I’m a part of.”
Washington’s pandemic film was Tenet, the dazzling and discombobulating time travel thriller directed by Christopher Nolan – or “Mr Nolan” as Washington calls him. He led the film’s meticulously crafted chaos as a shadowy CIA operative known only as ‘The Protagonist’.
When it finally opened in September 2020 after several delays, Tenet was hailed by many as the “saviour of cinema” because it was the first big blockbuster to launch post-lockdown after many others had cut their losses and gone straight to streaming. “I thought it was pretty rock ‘n’ roll that he believed that much in the film,” Washington says, even if the $365million it grossed reportedly wasn’t enough to break even.
He played another formidable undercover agent in 2023’s The Creator, a brilliant sci-fi blockbuster set in a dystopian future ravaged by AI, which was released during the SAG-AFTRA actors’ strike last summer.
But he’s in London today, sitting in a posh hotel room with bottles of sparkling water within reach, to talk about The Piano Lesson. A passion project for Washington, the film is based on August Wilson’s revered 1987 play of the same name: a searing drama exploring racial violence, generational trauma and social change. It’s also something of a family affair. Washington’s younger brother Malcolm directed it while their Hollywood legend father Denzel served as producer. “This movie proved to me that I can work with my family,” says Washington before laughing. “Nobody killed each other!”
Washington, a sharp dresser, is wearing a loose-fitting suit that is probably Dior – certainly, that’s what he slips into for The Piano Lesson‘s London Film Festival premiere the day after we meet. He’s an immediately relaxed presence and speaks so passionately about the film that at one point he says sorry for cutting us off mid-question, tapping NME gently on the knee to cement his apology.
Washington is magnificent in The Piano Lesson as Boy Willie Charles, an ambitious farmer who has travelled to Pittsburgh from his home in the American South to claim a family heirloom. By selling the valuable object – a wooden piano engraved with the faces of his forefathers – he hopes he can raise enough cash to purchase fertile farmland that was once worked by his enslaved ancestors.
Standing in Boy Willie’s way is his stoic sister Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) who doesn’t want to let the piano go because of its history. When the siblings’ father stole the instrument from the Sutters, the rich white family who oppressed them, he was killed in retaliation. Gently refereed by their unflappable Uncle Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson, who played the lead in the original 1987 stage production), Boy Willie and Berniece engage in an incredibly tense and ultimately fateful battle of wills. It’s an enthralling rivalry with Washington’s crackling physicality matched by Deadwyler’s equally intense stillness.
Berniece is still mourning Crawley, her husband and the father of her 11-year-old daughter Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith), and is tightly-wound but desperate to present a respectable front. Boy Willie seems more comfortable in his skin: he’s coarse and cocky as he pursues Berniece, Doaker and uncle Wining Boy (Michael Potts), around their Pittsburgh house.
For Washington, it’s the siblings’ similarities that makes them worthy adversaries. “I think that’s a part of why he provokes her – because he’s like, ‘You’re from the same place [as me]. In fact, you are more like our daddy than even I am. So let me get the gangsta out’,” he says.
In Wilson’s stage play, Boy Willie comes out and tells Doaker: “I see Berniece still try to be stuck up.” Though this line doesn’t feature in the film, which was scripted by his director brother and Virgil Williams, the Oscar-nominated writer of 2017’s Mudbound, Washington still believes Boy Willie views his sister’s “buttoned up thing” as “an act”. But, even if he sees through Berniece, does Boy Willie really believe he can browbeat her into giving up the piano? “That’s a good question – does he actually believe it?” Washington ponders. “Maybe not. Maybe that’s why he’s so combative? Maybe he’s hoping that she doesn’t go along with it?”
“This movie proved to me that I can work with my family… nobody killed each other”
Washington made his professional stage debut as Boy Willie in a 2022 Broadway production of The Piano Lesson. His brother Malcolm had begun working on the film adaptation two years prior to this, but he tells NME that he “knew for sure” that John David was his Boy Willie. Malcolm’s film reunites his brother with three other actors from the Broadway production: Jackson, Potts and Ray Fisher, who provides poignant light relief as Boy Willie’s lumbering accomplice Lymon.
“The greatest challenge was trying not to fear adaptation and interpretation,” says Malcolm, who admits that the play’s legacy was “daunting” for all involved. John David has a similar reverence for “the poetry and music” in Wilson’s writing. “It feels like a rite-of-passage. The kind of actor I want to be, I have to be able to interpret this story and character, and make it my own. And to conquer that, I have to do it on stage first.”
It’s fair to say that John David Washington took a little time to realise – or perhaps accept – that he wanted to be an actor at all. As a child, he made cameo appearances in two of his father’s films, 1992’s Malcolm X and 1995’s The Book of Eli, but at school and college he excelled at sports. For the lion’s share of his twenties, he earned a living playing pro American football for teams including the Sacramento Mountain Lions.
It’s a world away from acting in a Christopher Nolan film, but Washington says football gave him transferable skills. “[Even if you’re] coming from different religious or political beliefs, you can come together to achieve something. I found that in football. I’ve also found it here [in acting].” He also learned “perseverance” from having to play through pain and injury. “I had a sports hernia surgery recently, and that was the NFL’s parting gift to me,” he noted in 2018.
“Sometimes I’m still like: ‘Am I gonna get cut today?'”
Washington admits that there are “negative” parallels between the two careers, though, namely the “paranoia” that springs from constantly feeling replaceable. “In football I thought I was gonna get cut from the team every week,” he says. “So I don’t care if it’s a table read [for a film] or what number I am on the call sheet, sometimes I’m still like: ‘Am I gonna get cut today?’ That’s just PTSD, man.”
Washington said in 2022 that his athletic career was motivated by “independence” and establishing himself as something other than Denzel’s son. “Even though I was hiding what I really wanted to do, it gave me an identity”. Three years after he retired from the football field in 2012, he was cast as the hyper-driven NFL player Ricky Jerret in HBO’s Ballers, a sports dramedy starring Dwayne Johnson. Initially Washington “didn’t want anyone to know who I really was” but joining Instagram effectively blew his cover.
“I did a couple of photoshoots and people would [edit the pictures] with these weird inspirational quotes,” he says, worried about looking pretentious. But while Ballers and the odd cheesy meme put Washington on the acting map, it was Spike Lee’s wildly entertaining 2018 biopic BlacKkKlansman that made him a major player. Washington earned a Golden Globe nomination for his layered lead performance as Ron Stallworth, an African American cop who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the ’70s.
He says making BlacKkKlansman and then Tenet two years later “changed my life”, but not just because they raised his profile. “[Those directors] actually believed in me – I know that because of what they kept in,” he says. Like many actors, Washington hates watching himself back but felt validated when he saw final cuts featuring takes where he really used his “instincts”. This happened again when he worked with Euphoria’s Sam Levinson on Malcolm & Marie, an intimate two-hander that he and Zendaya made in 2021 during lockdown.
After proving himself again by making August Wilson’s dialogue sing in The Piano Lesson, Washington wants to take on another iconic playwright: Shakespeare. “I would love to play Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew – I’ve done it before, but it wasn’t a full production,” he says. He’s particularly keen to tread the boards in London after seeing his sister Olivia seven times this summer in Slave Play, Jeremy O.Harris’s edgy exploration of race, gender and sexuality. For the record, he says he’s never really bothered when he takes the tube.
With time drawing to a close, and the sparkling water largely untouched, NME brings up Washington’s 2022 quotes about “hiding” from his destiny. Sometimes actors roll their eyes when reminded of something they said in the past, but Washington addresses these comments head-on. “I’m in strong pursuit of the actor I’m trying to be – this is very much who I am,” he says. “I’ve been wanting to do this my whole life and now I’m at the point where I can see the artist that maybe I could become. And that’s so exciting for me. The hiding is over.”
‘The Piano Lesson’ is released in cinemas November 8 before it arrives on Netflix November 22