1

Denzel Washington keeping the Faith in Hollywood

I tried not posted the whole article but it is REALLY GOOD!!! Denzel is by far my favorite actor and this article title "Keeping the faith" seals the deal.  Man on Fire is my favorite movie of all time. Some excerpts in the article read: "Denzel Washington is more than just an Oscar-winning superstar. He's a Christian who's serious about his roles ... even when they get a bit bloody, like in the Book of Eli." "...Though Washington isn't a huge fan of the word "religion" and refrains from any sort of "I'm right, you're wrong" talk, he is not ashamed to speak bluntly about his Christian beliefs. "I believe that Jesus is the Son of God," he says. "I've been filled with the Holy Spirit. I know it's real. I was in the room. My cheeks blew up, I cried like a baby, and it scared me to death. It kind of scared me off it. I backed up and went the other direction, to be honest with you. I didn't know what was going on. It was too strong. It has taken me many years to come back around." Sitting in his house recently, reading the Bible (he's on his third time reading the whole thing straight through), Washington came across a passage about wisdom and understanding in Proverbs 4, which made him reflect on his life. "I'm in this big house with all this stuff," he observed. "I've heard that saying, 'You never see a U-Haul behind a hearse.' You can't take it with you. The Egyptians tried; they got robbed. I said, 'What do you want, Denzel?' And one of the devotional words that day was wisdom. So I started praying on that. 'God, give me a dose of that.' I can't get any more successful. But I can get better. I can learn to love more. I can learn to be more understanding. I can gain more wisdom." Like his character in The Book of Eli, Washington believes in prophetic calling and tries to make the most of what he believes God has given him to work with: In his case, worldwide fame and one of the most storied acting careers of his generation. Washington recalls a story from when he was 20 years old that demonstrates how intimately he relates his faith with his career. The day was March 27, 1975, and Washington—who had just been kicked out of school—was sitting in his mother's beauty parlor. An old woman who was under the dryer kept looking at Washington and then asked him for a piece of paper, on which she shakily wrote the word "prophecy." The woman was named Ruth Green, one of the oldest church members in the town, known to have a gift of prophecy. That day she said to Washington, "Boy, you are going to travel the world and speak to millions of people." That summer, Washington was a counselor at a YMCA Camp in Connecticut. The counselors performed skits for the kids, and someone suggested to Washington that he had natural talent and should pursue acting. That fall, Washington went back to school at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus, where he started his training in acting. "Years later," remembers Washington, "I asked my pastor if he thought I was called to be a priest, and he said, 'Well, aren't you talking to millions of people? Haven't you traveled the world?'" Recognizing that he has been placed in a unique position, Washington feels compelled to make the most of it, "preaching" positive messages however he can through his acting. "I've tried to bend my roles," he says, "even the worst of roles like Training Day. The first thing I wrote on my script [for Training Day] was 'the wages of sin is death.' In the original script, you found out that [my character] died on television. And I said, 'No, no. In order for me to justify him living in the worst way, he has to die in the worst way.' I had Ethan [Hawke] pull me out of the car, and I crawled like a snake. The whole neighborhood turns their back on me, and then I get blown to bits." It was a littler easier to "bend" the character of Eli in a positive direction, "though not really," jokes Washington, because "this guy is more violent than the guy inTraining Day. He's more violent than Malcolm X." Similar to Washington's character in Man on Fire, however, Eli's violence is in the service of protecting the innocent. READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE.