*Care to guess how many times Denzel Washington has played a cop in a movie? The answer is 13. And that 13th is in the new film, “The Little Things.” In it, Washington plays a disgraced Los Angeles County Sheriff’s detective who finds a chance at redemption when he believes a serial killer he once chased is on another murder spree.
While Washington portrays a cop on screen, in real life he also makes it known he is not a fan of Black Lives Matter protests and calls to “defund the police.” The bottom line is he’s quite sympathetic to law officers and has no problem saying so.
“I have the utmost respect for what they do, for what our soldiers do, [people] that sacrifice their lives,” Washington tells Yahoo Entertainment during a recent interview. “I just don’t care for people who put those kind of people down. If it weren’t for them, we would not have the freedom to complain about what they do.”
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Washington, 66, says his appreciation for police officers and the like go back to a ride-along he did while preparing to play a cop-turned-district attorney in the 1991 thriller Ricochet.
“I went out on call with a sergeant,” he recalls. “We got a call of a man outside his house with a rifle that was distraught. We pulled up and did a U-turn past the house and came up short of the house. He told me to sit in the car, which I was gonna do. I wasn’t getting out. He got out. As he got out, another car came screaming up and two young people jumped out screaming. As it turned out, it was their grandfather. This policeman defused the entire situation by just remaining calm.
“But it showed me in an instant how they can lose their life. … He didn’t overreact. He could’ve pulled his gun out and shot the people that came up driving real fast. He could’ve shot the old man that was distraught and a bit confused, I think he was suffering a little bit from dementia. But in an instant, it taught me, and I never forgot it, what our law enforcement people have to deal with moment to moment, second to second.”
As far as his next project, Washington notes it will have him BEHIND the camera as takes another turn at directing. The project is “Journal for Jordan” starring Michael B. Jordan. All we know about it at this point is that it’s about a soldier who “makes the ultimate sacrifice.”
“The Little Things” is now in theaters and on HBO Max.
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