Denzel Washington has been sober for nearly the last ten years, but he used to have one vice in particular: wine.
The 69-year-old actor discusses his history with wine, drugs like LSD, and growing up in New York in the 1970s in a new profile for Esquire magazine.
“Wine is very tricky,” he warned. “It’s very slow … It ain’t like, boom, all of a sudden.”
He explained that, unlike harder substances, he had this “ideal idea of wine tastings and all that — which is what it was at first.”
“And that’s a very subtle thing,” he added.
Washington said his habit really picked up in 1999 after he built a house with a ten-thousand-bottle wine cellar and “learned to drink the best.”
He added, “Wine was my thing, and now I was popping $4,000 bottles just because that’s what was left.”
“The Gladiator II” star eventually developed a system for managing his intake; he would regularly order two of the finest bottles of wine available from his favorite liquor store.
“And my wife’s saying, ‘Why do you keep ordering just two?’ I said, ‘Because if I order more, I’ll drink more.’ So I kept it to two bottles, and I would drink them both over the course of the day,” he told the publication.
Despite his daily wine intake, the “Equalizer 3” star said he never drank while he was working or preparing for a role, not even during the filming of “Flight,” which follows the story of an alcoholic pilot.
“I would clean up, go back to work — I could do both,” he said. “However many months of shooting, bang, it’s time to go. Then, boom.Three months of wine, then time to go back to work.”
The actor admitted this pattern was easier to maintain when he was younger.
“Two months off and let’s go. But drinking was a fifteen-year pattern. And truth be told, it didn’t start in ’99. It started earlier,” he explained.
Washington, who was born and raised in Mount Vernon, N.Y., described what it was like growing up there in the late ‘70s. Hanging out in the projects with folks who exposed him to heroin, cocaine, hard liquor, and more, he admits experimenting but personally “never got strung out” on any of it.
In fact, much of that early life experience has since been infused into some of Washington’s biggest and most complex characters. Even still, he said, “I can’t think of a single role where I would say, ‘Man, that’s me.’ Entirely me? No, no.”
Since quitting drinking, he feels “things are opening up” for him.
“Like being seventy,” he said. “It’s real. And it’s okay. This is the last chapter—if I get another thirty, what do I want to do? My mother made it to ninety-seven.”
The husband and father of four has also been making fitness more of a priority these days, thanks to Lenny Kravitz, who introduced him to his trainer.
“I’m doing the best I can,” he said.
As he’s been noting along the press run for “Gladiator II,” he also has thoughts around upcoming projects that may prove to be his last — and yes, those include two more “Equalizer” films.
“People love those daggone ‘Equalizers,’” he said.
