Coming off a fantastic performance in Flight, Denzel Washington is looking to try his hand at directing again with an adaptation of the stage play Fences. Washington has directed twice before (Antwone Fisher and The Great Debaters) and both efforts were pretty good. He hasn’t directed in six years but it looks like he’s hoping to take another crack at it.
In a recent interview with Empire, he revealed his plans to direct and star in the adaptation, which was scripted by August Wilson. Washington already won a Tony Award for starring in the stage version of Fences, so the role shouldn’t be too difficult for him to step into.
Check out his quote below.
“I love the theatre, directing is my second love and acting is my third, and I want to do all three…[Fences] reawakened me about the work, and my commitment to the work. I said to myself: ‘I’ve got to dig deeper’. The reason I did Fences is that Scott Rudin sent me the script August Wilson wrote – the only one of his plays that he wrote as a screenplay – to act and direct. I really do want to direct this.”
For those who haven’t see the play, it’s set on 1950s Pittsburgh and centers on “53-year-old Troy Maxon (Washington), a sanitation employee who once aspired to be a professional baseball player and now faces daily discrimination while coming to terms with his lost ambitions.”
Fences itself doesn’t sound like anything too spectacular and having not seen the play, I can’t comment too much on it. That being said, I do enjoy Denzel Washington as an actor, a lot. Rarely, if ever, does he give a bad performance and at the very least, Fences sounds like it will give him a chance to do some solid character work.