MOVIE NEWS – Denzel Washington’s career is packed with outstanding thrillers, which makes it particularly striking that he once passed on a role that seemed almost tailor-made for him. The actor later openly admitted that rejecting the project was a major mistake, while David Fincher’s movie went on without him to become one of the defining thrillers of the 1990s.

Washington hardly needs an introduction for anyone who loves crime movies and psychological thrillers. His filmography demonstrates an unusually sharp instinct for material that lets him operate inside tense, morally complicated stories, but even a career as accomplished as his contains opportunities that slipped away. In the mid-1990s, he was offered a leading role in a movie that would eventually be regarded as one of the decade’s greatest thrillers, only to reject it after reading the screenplay. It is a decision he has never completely forgotten.

That movie was David Fincher’s 1995 masterpiece Seven. Its story follows veteran detective Somerset, played by Morgan Freeman, and his younger, considerably more impulsive partner Mills as they hunt a serial killer whose elaborate murders revolve around the seven deadly sins. Brad Pitt ultimately became Mills, but Washington had been one of the major actors considered for the part, and he later made no attempt to disguise how badly he believed he had misjudged the project.

Asked in interviews about roles he regretted declining, Washington has specifically named Seven, alongside Michael Clayton. His assessment of the Fincher decision was particularly unforgiving: “I was offered Seven and I said no. Brad Pitt ended up getting the part and I totally screwed up.” Washington has also explained that he has never been someone who aggressively chases projects, works every room, or flatters people in pursuit of roles, because offers have generally continued to reach him throughout his career. The real challenge, in his view, has always been separating worthwhile material from the large amount of bad material that comes with those opportunities.

At the Time, David Fincher Was Still Best Known for Alien 3

Washington later offered a straightforward explanation for why the screenplay had put him off: he considered it “too demonic.” His hesitation becomes a little easier to understand when viewed from the perspective of 1995 rather than through Fincher’s later reputation. At that point, the director was still widely associated with music videos and his difficult feature-film debut, Alien 3, whose troubled production and reception hardly guaranteed that his next movie would become a landmark. Once Seven arrived, however, the calculation changed completely: Fincher established himself as one of modern thriller cinema’s defining filmmakers, while the movie became an enduring cornerstone of both Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman’s careers.

There is some irony in what happened next. Only four years later, Washington signed on for another dark serial-killer thriller, The Bone Collector, opposite Angelina Jolie. He was not the only major action star to turn Fincher down either: Sylvester Stallone also passed on Seven before eventually appearing in the far less celebrated serial-killer thriller D-Tox. Missing one classic obviously did little lasting damage to Washington, who continued building one of the most acclaimed careers of his generation. Still, once he finally saw what Fincher, Pitt, and Freeman had made, even Washington knew that this particular rejection had been a spectacular miscalculation.

Source: 3DJuegos