After losing the Oscar to Kevin Spacey, Denzel Washington claims he “got bitter.”
News Mania Desk / Piyal Chatterjee / 20th November 2024
Reviews of Denzel Washington’s performance in Gladiator II are overwhelmingly positive. The actor, who has starred in a number of highly regarded films and received multiple accolades for his work, has thought back on the year he lost the Oscar. In the year 2000, he received a nomination for his role in The Hurricane. Denzel described how he “became bitter” after losing to Kevin Spacey in a recent interview with Esquire.
During the chat, Denzel reflected on the Academy Awards night and said, “I think I had won the Golden Globe for Hurricane—see, I barely remember now, ain’t that crazy? But then, at the Oscars, they called Kevin Spacey’s name for American Beauty. 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.”
He went on to add, “I’m sure I went home and drank that night. I had to. I don’t want to sound like, Oh, he won my Oscar, or anything like that. It wasn’t like that. And you know, there was talk in the town about what was going on over there on that side of the street, and that’s between him and God. I ain’t got nothing to do with that. I pray for him. That’s between him and his maker. I went through a time then when 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. You vote. You watch them. I ain’t watching that. I gave up. I got bitter. My pity party. So I’ll tell you, for about fifteen years, from 1999 to 2014 when I put the beverage down, I was bitter.”
Denzel eventually won the Oscar for Best Actor for the crime drama Training Day two years after this defeat. Glory (1989) had earned him an Oscar in the Best Supporting Actor category. He has received eight Oscar nominations.
