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Denzel Washington is appoaching a decade of sobriety, saying “I haven’t had a thimble’s worth since” quitting alcohol when he turned 60.
The Gladiator II star — who turns 70 next month — looks back on his relationship with alcohol in the Winter issue of Esquire, where he graces the cover.
It started, he tells the outlet, with wine. ““Wine is very tricky. It’s very slow. It ain’t like, boom, all of a sudden.”
“I never got strung out on heroin. Never got strung out on coke. Never got strung out on hard drugs. I shot dope just like they shot dope, but I never got strung out,” he told the publication. “And I never got strung out on liquor. I had this ideal idea of wine tastings and all that — which is what it was at first. And that’s a very subtle thing. I mean, I drank the best.”
He shared that when his family added a wine cellar to their house, “I learned to drink the best. So I’m gonna drink my ’61s and my ’82s and whatever we had. Wine was my thing, and now I was popping $4,000 bottles just because that’s what was left.”
“And then later in those years I’d call Gil Turner’s Fine Wines & Spirits on Sunset Boulevard and say, 'Send me two bottles, the best of this or that.' ”
When his wife of more than 40 years, Pauletta, would ask him why he kept ordering two bottles, Washington replied, “ ‘Because if I order more, I’ll drink more. ‘So I kept it to two bottles, and I would drink them both over the course of the day.”
While he says “I never drank while I was working or preparing. I would clean up, go back to work — I could do both. However many months of shooting, bang, it’s time to go. Then, boom. Three months of wine, then time to go back to work.”
He shared that he “wasn’t drinking when we filmed Flight,” the 2012 drama in which he played an alcoholic airline pilot, but "I’m sure I did as soon as I finished. That was getting toward the end of the drinking, but I knew a lot about waking up and looking around, not knowing what happened,” he told Esquire.
Looking back, Washington says, “I’ve done a lot of damage to the body. We’ll see. I’ve been clean.”
“Things are opening up for me now — like being seventy. It’s real. And it’s okay. This is the last chapter — if I get another thirty, what do I want to do? My mother made it to ninety-seven. I’m doing the best I can.”