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In September, The Equalizer 3 became the best-reviewed movie in the violent revenge thriller trilogy starring Denzel Washington, 69, and with $191 million at the box office, the biggest hit (despite scant promotion, thanks to Hollywood’s strike). This month, it was the No. 1 hit on Netflix. So it’s time to start asking whether the two-time Oscar winner (and 10-time nominee) is the greatest actor working today. That may sound like a lofty claim, but a solid case can certainly be made. In fact, we’ll make it right here, right now, with the following 10 reasons.
1. He’s very good at being very bad
The movie that proves it: Training Day
Washington earned his second Oscar statuette in 2002 for playing Detective Alonzo Harris, a corrupt LAPD cop and all-around nasty piece of business in Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day. As a narc gone to the dark side — and not even remotely repentant about it — Washington tries to seduce Ethan Hawke’s rookie into his crooked version of the law. Thanks to Washington’s charged, third-rail performance, what could have been a by-the-numbers crime-thriller, bristles with lip-smacking evil.
Watch it: Training Day, on Netflix
2. Because of the hard-to-watch scene that clinched his first Oscar
The movie that proves it: Glory
Edward Zwick’s 1989 Civil War drama, Glory, tells the story of one of the more overlooked chapters of the conflict, namely, that of the all-Black 54th Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. You’d think that costarring with Morgan Freeman, it would be impossible for anyone else to steal a scene — let alone give the most powerful performance in the film. But that’s what Washington does as Private Trip, a runaway slave who joins the Union army, never more so than during the excruciating sequence when he is flogged for insubordination. Study Washington’s defiant face during the scene and try to argue that anyone else deserved that year’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
Watch it: The harrowing, hard-to-watch scene from Glory on YouTube (Glory, on Prime Video)
3. He’s just as impressive on stage
The play that proves it: Fences
Unlike most movie stars who line up a string of big movie-star paydays, one after the other, Washington is actually a trained theater actor who returns to the stage as often as he can. In the past decade, he’s appeared on Broadway in revivals of A Raisin in the Sun, The Iceman Cometh and August Wilson's Fences (for which he won a Tony). Washington felt so attached to that last role, a frustrated working-class father in the ’50s, that he adapted Wilson’s play into a Best Picture-nominated 2016 film, which he directed and starred in opposite Viola Davis.
Watch it: Fences, on Prime Video
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