With Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” Denzel Washington got to cross a major item off his bucket list. He’s a longtime fan of the Coen brothers’ “dangerous” films (he cites “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” as an all-time favorite), and “Macbeth” marked the first chance the Oscar winner had to work with one half of the acclaimed directing team.
In the case of “Macbeth,” the danger Washington speaks of was reflected in Coen’s approach to the play. From the very first rehearsal, the actor said, there was “no stick-up-the-butt Shakespearean acting.”
“You can actually deliver a line and pick your nose at the same time,” said Washington of this philosophy to the New York Times. “It’s OK. If your nose bothers you, then pick it, for crying out loud.”
For Coen, this was a matter of “rearranging, cutting, and inventing” in the vein of Orson Welles’ 1948 “Macbeth,” which the filmmaker told the Times he sees as the gold standard. But that didn’t mean he was looking to emulate that film. Instead, Coen used Welles’ version as inspiration to inject his own directorial vision into a story that is already well-known.
Washington called the director’s unconventional perspective “endearing,” and revealed that Coen’s eccentricity extended to one very particular aspect of the actor’s line delivery. “He would always talk to me about my R’s,” Washington said. “ ‘Make sure you hit the hard R’s.’ He was obsessed with R’s. I’m like, ‘OK, arrrre you sure?’ He was crazy about it: ‘You gotta hit the R’s.’ ”
Washington’s response indicates that, even while working on a story as notoriously dark as “Macbeth,” he never lost his sense of humor. “What about the T’s or the L’s?” he quipped.
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