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Yet he can be an inscrutable star, friendly and freewheeling when he chats about, say, a favorite restaurant (Jezebel's, a New York City soul-food place), but guarded when queries are made about his personal life and professional motives. Talking about himself, he gives a well-calibrated performance--though he's too good an actor for anyone to determine which of his moods are felt and which are feigned. When difficult questions are posed, he grows monosyllabic, evasive. Asked about a confrontation he reportedly had with director Quentin Tarantino over the repeated use of the N- word in Pulp Fiction, he pirouettes around the issue: "I did have problems with [Pulp Fiction]. I like the movie, I think he's very talented, and I expressed to him the problems I had with it. But I won't talk about it because I didn't talk about it to him in order for other people to hear about it."
Washington is more candid on other topics. He ridicules Senator Bob Dole's suggestion that there's too much sex and violence in movies: "I've looked at C-SPAN and said the same thing." Although he loved the movies Menace II Society and Boyz N the Hood, he feels the gangsta film genre may be exhausted: "I don't pay to see 'life in the hood' movies anymore. That story's been told. If someone has something to spill from their heart, God bless 'em, they should...but if someone's just saying, 'Oh I'm gonna keep doing this 'cause it makes money,' I'll be the first person in line to punch that person in the head."
Washington's varied roles will keep coming: soon he will co-star with Whitney Houston in a remake of the 1947 Cary Grant comedy The Bishop's Wife. "I bring myself to any part," he says. "And I'll bring my experiences and voice my opinions." Those opinions are often present beneath the surface; in his performances, there is a smoldering Afrocentricity that gives his work depth, connecting it to a cultural reality larger than the movies in which he appears. In one scene in The Pelican Brief, he kicks at a cab that has passed him by. In Devil in a Blue Dress, his character takes pointed pride in being one of the few blacks in his neighborhood to own his own home. Says Carl Franklin, who directed Devil: "Denzel is blessed. He has 'it.'" Other black actors had it but never got the chance. Washington, at last, is getting to use it.
--With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles