In 1992, when he was only 8 years old, a young actor who today finds himself headlining several blockbusters, took his very first steps in the cinema in Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X”.
At 39 years old, after a short career as a professional American football player, the young American actor John David Washington seems to have decided to follow in the footsteps of his father Denzel on Hollywood film sets, by building an increasingly filmography. more solid.
Enigmatic hero of Christopher Nolan’s fascinating Tenet and tortured protagonist of Gareth Edwards’ recent The Creator, this multifaceted actor also delivered an impressive performance opposite Zendaya in the drama Malcolm & Marie, in 2021.
It was in 2018 with the feature film BlacKkKlansman: I Infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan by Spike Lee, in which he played the leading role, that John David Washington was truly revealed to the general public. But contrary to what one might think, this film awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes is not the first collaboration between the actor and the director of Do The Right Thing.
Indeed, 26 years earlier, when he was only 8 years old, it was in front of Spike Lee’s camera that the very young John David Washington had taken his first steps on the big screen. We could thus see him during a very short shot at the end of Malcolm X, in which his father Denzel Washington played the main role.
Warner Bros.
In the final minutes of the feature film, while a teacher commemorated the famous political activist’s birthday by telling her students that they “were all Malcolm X”, we could then see several African-American schoolchildren get up from their chairs face the camera and each take turns declaiming “I am Malcolm X!” John David Washington was the first of these.
“I was a little kid and I didn’t say more than three words, ‘I am Malcolm X.’ That was my only line, and I said it with passion.”told the actor many years later, on the microphone of CNN.
After this very small role – succinct but emblematic – John David Washington waited until 2015 before setting foot on a set again. In this case, that of the series Ballers, in which he played a professional footballer alongside Dwayne Johnson.
(Re)discover the credits of the series…