Denzel Washington has opened up about how it hit him when he didn’t win the Best Actor Oscar for The Hurricane.
In 2000, Denzel was nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award for the second time in his career, the first being for his titular role in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X.
In a new interview, the Gladiator II actor revealed that he got bitter after he didn’t win the Oscar a second time.
He told Esquire Magazine: “At the Oscars, they called Kevin Spacey’s name for ‘American Beauty,’” The Bone Collector star said. “I have a memory of turning around and looking at him, and nobody was standing but the people around him. And everyone else was looking at me. Not that it was this way. Maybe that’s the way I perceived it. Maybe I felt like everybody was looking at me. Because why would everybody be looking at me? Thinking about it now, I don’t think they were.”
“I’m sure I went home and drank that night. I had to,” he confessed.
Washington continued: “I don’t want to sound like, ‘Oh, he won my Oscar,’ or anything like that. It wasn’t like that. And you know, there was talk in the town about what was going on over there on that side of the street, and that’s between him and God. I ain’t got nothing to do with that. I pray for him. That’s between him and his maker.”
After the loss, the actor stopped watching Oscar nominated films and voting for the awards.
He shared: “I went through a time then when [my wife] Pauletta would watch all the Oscar movies — I told her, I don’t care about that. Hey: ‘They don’t care about me? I don’t care,’” Washington said. “You vote. You watch them. I ain’t watching that. I gave up. I got bitter. My pity party.”
Despite his loss in the Academy Awards of 2000, he went on to take home the Best Actor gong for Training Day in 2002.
