An ominous line Denzel Washington wrote in the training day script

By the late 90s, Denzel Washington seemed to have done it all. After his breakthrough role in arguably the best Civil War film ever made, 1989. “Glory” earned him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, he received another Oscar nomination for his performance in Malcolm X in 1992 and The Hurricane in 1999. During that time, he’s proven that he’s also more than capable of bringing his laid-back charisma to less mental stuff, like the action movie Scarlet Tide and the crime drama Bone Collector.

But by the end of the millennium, there was one thing Denzel had never done: play a bad guy. The actor was so magnetic by nature that it seems Hollywood never thought to waste such good looks on a villain, and so Denzel remained the good guy until 2001. However, that year he turned in a film that not only earned him his second Oscar win, but also marked his transition to playing the bad guy – and what a debut it was.

“Training Day” was written by David Ayer, who put into the script his real-life experiences growing up in the rough areas of Los Angeles. Director Antoine Fuqua took this a step further by using real-life gangs and real locations in South Los Angeles to make a film about a corrupt LAPD officer who takes a rookie cop out for a day on probation. But while Ayer and Fuqua’s contributions were integral to what remains one of the best crime thrillers of the era, it was Denzel’s unbridled commitment to his role and the ease with which he turned his charisma to create one of the great screen villains . , which really made “Training Day” both a modern classic and one of the Denzel’s most popular movies.

How did a person make this transition so seamlessly? He certainly had a lot going into him, but it all seemed to start with a single phrase he wrote on his copy of the Training Day script.

If Denzel Washington’s ‘Training Day’ cast has had no shortage of controversy. The concern of groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was that after more than a decade of goodwill playing relatable, morally upright characters, Denzel was going to squander it all by playing a truly despicable individual in the form of LAPD Detective Alonzo Harris . But they needn’t have worried, because as loathsome as Alonzo was in Denzel’s hands, he was also extremely watchable, to the point where his charm often distracted from his corrupt dealings.

In the film, Alonzo hosts Ethan Hawke’s Jake Hoyt for a day while he conducts his anti-drug work. As the film progresses, Alonso reveals the depth of his corruption, and Jake is forced to confront the degradation at the core of the very power he works for. It all ends in an all-time classic scene in which Denzel’s cop is confronted by Jake and a whole bunch of gang members who demand answers for his dodgy deeds and their consequences.

By all accounts, Denzel was at his absolute best as Alonso, improvising throughout the shoot and bringing a magnetism to the role that only he could. But it seems the actor never forgot how serious a story he was telling. Talking to Morning call back in 2021, he recalled writing a single, decidedly dark line on his copy of the “Training Day” script that opened up the entire film for him. As Washington explained to the publication:

“The first thing I wrote in my script was, ‘The wages of sin is death,’ and that’s the movie for me. Once I put it on the page, I felt like I could be as angry as I wanted. because I knew what was coming for him and he really gets what he deserves.

The phrase “For the wages of sin is death” comes from the beginning of the Bible verse Romans 6:23, which fully declares “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus ours. Lord.” This refers to the idea that wages are something given to the person who worked for them, in which case sin is said to cause the person to die as payment.

After reading the script for “Training Day” in its entirety, Denzel Washington admitted that the film in no way seeks to glorify Alonso’s actions. It was a story about someone who thought they had figured out the system enough to game it to their advantage, but who couldn’t escape the cosmic justice that befell them as a result of all the heinous deeds they had committed.

For an actor who has never played a villain before, you have to marvel at Denzel’s ability to get to the heart of the character so succinctly before filming even begins. The phrase he wrote in his script is not an indictment of Alonso himself, but an acknowledgment that the character went too far and could not escape the cosmic consequences. Denzel himself words“He’s confused, he’s crossed a line, he’s angry, but he’s not completely bad. I think in some ways he did his job too well. He’s learned to manipulate how to push the edge further and further and, in the process, he’s become tougher than some of the guys he’s chasing.”