Denzel Washington almost turned down “The Magnificent Seven.”
Director Antoine Fuqua – who has worked with the 68-year-old actor on The Equalizer trilogy after first teaming up on 2001’s Training Day – admitted selling his collaborator on the 2016 reboot wasn’t an easy task.
Speaking at Collider’s IMAX screening event for “The Equalizer 3,” he remembered opening his pitch with: “So, the sun is coming up. This man on this black horse comes…”
Fuqua recalled: “[Washington] goes, ‘Wait, what?’ I said, ‘A man on his horse,’ and Denzel’s like, ‘I’m not gonna get on a horse.’ [Laughs] I said, ‘No, no, let me finish! Magnificent Seven…’ And he just sat back and listened to me, let me get out my pitch.”
The filmmaker was convinced Washington would “walk away at any moment,” but thankfully he was willing to hear what Fuqua was planning.
“Like halfway through my pitch, I’m thinking, ‘Denzel is gonna get up and walk away at any moment.’ He’s gonna be like, ‘No, I’m not getting on the damn horse playing a cowboy,’ but he listened. He listened for a while. That took a while to get him to say yes to Magnificent Seven,” Fuqua recalled.
The pair have worked together on the latest instalment in the Equalizer franchise, but he insisted he isn’t planning a fourth film in the series.
He said: “It’s a nice send-off that he’s found a place. Because the first one is about finding purpose. He was trying to find a purpose, and he found it. The second one is about dealing with the past—his wife dying, Susan getting murdered, his friends betraying him — and he had to deal with his past. This one is about finding a place in life that you feel could be home and some peace. Where do you go from that? A prequel?”
