It seems some of the animosity between Denzel Washington and Josh Brolin‘s characters in American Gangster momentarily bled out off-screen in a heated exchange during filming.
In a recent interview with Graham Bensinger, Brolin — who was promoting his new memoir From Under the Truck — reflected on his career and upbringing, including what he described as a fleeting moment where he and his co-star nearly came to blows.
“Denzel and I, by the way, get along very well now,” he prefaced the anecdote, later describing Washington as someone he is “in awe of.” “We almost got into a fight.”
He continued, “Denzel was a little late to set and there was a whole thing there. And then he showed me the lines — he didn’t change any of my lines, but he kind of changed the structure of it. He said, ‘I think I’m gonna put this down here and I’m gonna put that up there.’ But he wouldn’t really look at me.”
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“So I was trying to remember the structure, and then we rehearsed,” the Dune actor recalled. “It wasn’t that many lines, mostly mine. And I’m supposed to be super confident. It’s Denzel Washington, man. It’s not easy. You’re just this actor who they’re trying out, seeing if he’s the real thing or not. And I forgot a line. And I put my hand on his shoulder and I said, ‘What’s the line?’ and he hit my hand off and he said, ‘Don’t ever f—ing put your hand on me.’ And I was like, ‘Holy shit, I’m gonna scrap with Denzel Washington. This is crazy.’ We’re not actors anymore, at least in my mind. In his mind, he was just doing his job.”
Brolin said he later understood that the Gladiator II star was simply dialed into his character: “He was that guy. He was Frank Lucas, period. But I didn’t know. And then we got through that moment. I said, ‘Are you OK?’ He said, ‘Yeah. You?’ I said, ‘Yeah. Can I get my line?’ He said, ‘Go for it.’ It’s like he’d said what he needed to say.”
As a seasoned veteran now, Brolin said he gets why actors tune into their performance as seriously as Washington had in that moment, and has heard of others doing so as well, including friend Robert Duvall. But as an actor starting out, “you just want to have an experience with that person … and those guys are just trying to do their job, so it makes sense to me that they would kind of narrow outside life into [something smaller] in any way that they can.”
Elsewhere in the conversation, Brolin previewed his role as a priest in the forthcoming Knives Out threequel, to be released next year and starring an A-List cast featuring Daniel Craig, Andrew Scott, Glenn Close, Kerry Washington, Josh O’Connor, Cailee Spaeny, Jeremy Renner, Mila Kunis and Daryl McCormack. Brolin described the film, from Rian Johnson, as “supremely written,” calling the project “a really good opportunity to sink into a role.”
Aside from Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, Brolin will star in Edgar Wright’s reimagining of The Running Man (based on Stephen King’s 1982 novel, later made into a 1987 movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger), portraying the villain to Glen Powell’s Ben Richards, a desperate man in a dystopian, futuristic American society who must participate in a violent reality show to win money for his gravely ill daughter. He is also in the forthcoming Weapons, opposite Julia Garner, a New Line horror movie hailing from Barbarian director Zach Cregger.
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