After “Blackkklansman” and “Tenet”, John David Washington is starring in “The Creator”, in theaters since Wednesday. He plays an American soldier infiltrated in Asia, charged with destroying a powerful artificial intelligence.
After Monsters, Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Gareth Edwards has signed a new science fiction film with The Creator, which spectators can discover in cinemas since September 27. The film projects us into a near future, where humans and artificial intelligence (AI) are waging a merciless war. An American soldier infiltrated in Asia is tasked with destroying a powerful artificial intelligence, before discovering that it is none other than a 6-year-old girl named Alphie.
In the role of this soldier, we find John David Washington, revealed by Blackkklansman and Tenet, another ambitious SF film. And we can say that the actor has comedy in his blood since he is none other than the son of the legendary Denzel Washington. It was alongside him that he debuted in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, at only eight years old, in a small role.
However, it is not on the big screen that he will first shine but on the sports fields. While studying at Morehouse College in Atlanta, his performance as an American football player was noted, which allowed him to obtain a scholarship to Morehouse. Subsequently, he continued to play football, notably in NFL Europa and the Rhein Fire club in Düsseldorf in Germany.
At the age of 28, John seriously injured his Achilles tendon and was forced to end his football career. Always attracted to comedy, the young man decided to throw himself into it with passion. He went through numerous auditions and ended up getting his first real role in 2015, that of football player Ricky Jerret in the series Ballers. He thus reveals himself to the general public by holding the star of the show, Dwayne Johnson, high.
Universal Pictures International France With Adam Driver in “Blackkklansman”
It was in 2018 that the general public truly discovered John David Washington. After successfully collaborating with his father, Spike Lee calls on the son to play the leading role of Blackkklansman. At the beginning of the 1970s, in the midst of the struggle for civil rights, and while several racial riots broke out in major cities in the United States, the first Black American officer in the Colorado Springs Police Department decided to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan. For his first major film role, the actor shares the bill with Adam Driver and climbs the steps of the Grand Palais at the Cannes Film Festival, where this fierce political farce wins the Grand Prix.
After The Old Man and the Gun, with Robert Redford, he returns to the forefront in 2020 with the highly anticipated Tenet. In this sci-fi blockbuster directed by Christopher Nolan, he plays an unnamed character whose mission is to save the world, while being confronted with a temporal reversal. It is then on Netflix that we find him, in the thriller Beckett and the marital drama Malcolm & Marie. The latter, filmed during confinement, is a black and white camera directed by Sam Levinson, the creator of Euphoria. This modern X-ray of the couple allows John David Washington to give the answer to Zendaya.
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“Tenet”
In 2022, he rubs shoulders with a four-star cast – notably composed of Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, Anya Taylor-Joy and Michael Shannon – in Amsterdam by David O. Russell. But public and critical reception is mixed.
The actor therefore returns this year with The Creator. The originality of the feature film lies in the way in which it was designed. The director wanted to create an original work of science fiction but was aware of the difficulty of financing such a project. To achieve this, he decided to make a modest feature film but with a strong visual style. He contacted the producer of Monsters and tried to explain to him that“we weren’t shooting a low-budget blockbuster, but the most ambitious independent film ever produced!”
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“The Creator”
Gareth Edwards highlights the involvement of John David Washington in tackling the role of Joshua: “He really wanted to have a visceral experience, similar to that of Joshua. Not only as an actor, but as a human being. He thus reproduced the attitude of his character by going, for example, to hang on to a boat for an hour or to go to temples to chat with monks. He completely immersed himself in the role to nourish Joshua: he wanted to go through the same emotions as him as an individual. All this while he was filming a film at the same time…”
We will find the actor in front of the camera of his brother, Malcolm, for The Piano Lesson, alongside Samuel L. Jackson.