ACTION MEN
EVER SINCE TRAINING DAY , DENZEL WASHINGTON AND ANTOINE FUQUA H AV E BE EN MAKING PHYSICAL, NO-NONSE NSE CINE MA. AS THE EQUALIZER 3 CLOSE S A BRUTAL CHAPTER, WE SPEAK TO THEM ABOUT BRINGING THE PAIN
WORDS CHRIS HEWITT
ILLUSTRATION HELLOVON STUDIO
Denzel Washington returns as Robert McCall in The Equalizer 3. Take that, bad guy!; With director Antoine Fuqua, on set in Italy; Calm under pressure; Shooting The Magnificent Seven (2016) in the desert heat; Guns ablaze in the same.
F YOU’VE BEEN SLEEPING on Denzel Washington and Antoine Fuqua’s big-screen takes on ’80s US TV classic The Equalizer, allow us to set you straight.
Halfway through 2018’s The Equalizer 2, Washington’s Robert McCall, a former government spook who now divides his time between being a Lyft driver and killing bad guys with everything from a corkscrew to a credit card, finds himself face-to-face with the special-ops team, led by Pedro Pascal’s Dave York, that killed his best friend. Except they’re outside York’s house, it’s early morning, and his wife and kids are very much in the vicinity. McCall regards them calmly, evenly, and with the merest of grins on his face, says, “The mistake you made was you killed my friend. So I’m going to kill each and every one of you, and the only disappointment in it for me is that I only get to do it once.”
It’s one of the great slices of tough-guy dialogue (courtesy of writer Richard Wenk), and there’s plenty more studded through the first two Equalizer movies, both crunching throwbacks to a simpler era of action heroes, of righteous men fighting for the little guy.
“There is something about that line,” Washington tells Empire. “His blood pressure goes down when most people’s goes up. This is what he’s really, really, really good at. I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse, but it’s his gift. That’s a heck of a hand to be dealt.”