The movie Denzel Washington only made for the money: “I had some bills to pay”

Posted On February 21, 2025February 21, 2025

Denzel Washington isn’t the sort of actor you’d associate with phoning in performances. In fact, he is sometimes the only actor in his movies who is not phoning in a performance. Even in Gladiator II, a film in which most of the cast was trying to chew the scenery, Washington swept in with his enormous robes and luxuriant syllable stretching and snatched every scene right out from under their noses. He shows up ready to dominate, and dominate he does.

You don’t earn ten Oscar nominations by following the money, either. Throughout his multi-decade career in Hollywood, Washington has taken some remarkable career gambles. Training Day, for example, was a thriller that got a lot nastier than the action-packed popcorn movies that were cramming the theatres at the time. Meanwhile, director Antoine Fuqua had yet to prove his talents in Hollywood. He was a prolific director of music videos, but he had only made two feature films, and neither was well received. When Training Day came out, it was a revelation for audiences, both in terms of Washington’s ability to play the bad guy and Fuqua’s skills behind the camera, but it certainly hadn’t been a foregone conclusion.

That said, Washington is pretty unsentimental when he talks about why he chooses to take movies, downplaying any notions of idealism and playing up the role of cold, hard cash. In a recent interview with The New York Times, he said that every movie he’s made was about the money. “I’ve taken every job for money,” he insisted. “There’s no job I’ve taken where I went: ‘You guys just keep the money. I’m just so glad to be an actor. I don’t even want the money.’”

This was clearly facetious, at least to some degree. While it’s probably true that he never rejected a paycheck for a role that he was already planning to make, it’s hard to believe that he went into Fences or Macbeth thinking only about the dollar signs.

There was one movie that he definitely did for the money, and the money alone, though. When the interviewer brought up the action movies Ricochet and Virtuosity and asked the actor if those had been financial rather than artistic necessities, Washington said, “Yeah, probably. Especially Virtuosity. I had some bills to pay. Ricochet was more like venturing down that road for the first time.”

Released in 1995, Virtuosity stars Russell Crowe as SID 6.7, a virtual reality amalgamation of the most dangerous serial killers to ever exist. Washington plays the police officer trying to hunt him down. It was a ridiculous premise, even by ‘90s thriller standards, and fared poorly at the box office. “Virtuosity,” Washington acknowledged, “Definitely had something to do with tuition.”

Ricochet, on the other hand, was more of a novelty for the actor, who, when the film was released in 1991, was a completely new genre for him. It had a much more sober premise, featuring Washington as a police officer-turned-district attorney in LA who is being hunted by a killer played by John Lithgow, who he arrested when he was still a cop. It’s no masterpiece, but it gave Washington his first taste of the genre and was far better than Virtuosity.

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