John David—the Washington we’re here to talk about today—will star in the most anticipated movie of the summer: Christopher Nolan’s top-secret and most ambitious project yet, Tenet. He’ll be playing a James Bond/Jason Bourne–type character. The men who lead Nolan’s films are superstars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Matthew McConaughey. And Washington is coming off a Golden Globe nomination for Lee’s BlacKkKlansman. He is now poised to become a household name, someone instantly recognizable, Hollywood’s next great leading man. This is John David Washington’s moment.
Right around that time, BlacKkKlansmanpremiered at Cannes. Spike Lee sat behind Christopher Nolan. Every so often, Lee snuck a glance at the writer-director to see how he was reacting to his film and his star. Lee recounts this story and then tells me to take down a note to read to Nolan when I talk to him later in the week.
“Ask him, say, ‘Dear Chris, this is your cinema brother, Spike Lee. I’m looking forward to seeing Tenet, starring the great, great John David Washington. Thank you for casting him and making yourself look good. Thank you for casting him, for hoisting him into the stratosphere. My question for you is: Did you decide that you’re going to cast John David Washington at the world premiere of BlacKkKlansman?’ ”
So I ask.
Nolan laughs. “Oh, very much,” he says. “By the way, it was a pretty intense experience to sit in front of Spike Lee at the premiere. And no, it very much sort of felt like destiny to me. That was an extraordinary screening, and the audience response to Spike’s movie was really electric in that room at Cannes; it was quite something. And I just felt a sort of magnetism there. It really was an important thing for me in terms of feeling like it was meant to be somehow.”
Nolan had first seen Washington in Ballers years before. He had no idea who he was—didn’t know his name or who his dad was. He was just struck by his charisma onscreen. Nolan, who writes many of his films, including Tenet, generally tries not to think about casting while he’s writing his scripts. But with Tenet, he simply couldn’t get Washington out of his head. So he called the actor, who was still filming Ballers at the time, into a meeting.
“In my first conversation with him, he just felt like somebody on the cusp of really great things. And so from a selfish point of view as a filmmaker, you immediately think, I’d like to be a part of that actor’s journey. I’d like to harness that energy that he has,” Nolan says. The role Washington has taken on is that of a pragmatic secret agent with a genuine warmth and humanity. Washington’s history as an athlete helped convince Nolan as well.
“The film has more action than any film I’ve ever done. It has a plethora of action sequences that he’s taken the lead in. So he gets to do all kinds of different things. That athleticism also puts itself into the way he walks down the street and the way he talks and the way he moves,” Nolan says. “I remember years ago reading an account of when [Bond franchise producer] Cubby Broccoli first saw Sean Connery and considered him to play James Bond. He looked out the window and watched him walk away at the end of the meeting and said, ‘He moves like a panther, he moves like a cat, like a catlike grace,’ and I think John David has his own version of that. In every move, there’s this extraordinary athleticism and energy. This kind of controlled energy just fits this type of character so well. He’s just extraordinarily graceful.”
Washington stars opposite Robert Pattinson, and the success of the film rides on the chemistry between the two, Nolan says. The actors met shortly before filming, when Pattinson invited his new castmates to his thirty-third-birthday party in L. A.
“He turned up late, and by that point I was very much in a convivial spirit, and then it was him and Aaron Taylor-Johnson turned up, and I think I was just screaming and shouting at them for like an hour, and I suddenly regretted everything I said afterward, and so I thought maybe we’re off to a really bad start, but he was very sweet about it,” Pattinson says. “He’s so positive and not positive in a really annoying way, like he’s definitely . . . you can definitely push him a little bit to be naughty. He doesn’t mind when other people are naughty.”
“It’s an incredibly complicated movie, like all of Chris’s movies. I mean, you have to watch them when they’re completely finished and edited three or four times to understand what the true meaning is,” Pattinson says. He pauses for a moment, then continues with a self-deprecating laugh. “When you’re doing them, I mean, there were months at a time where I’m like, ‘Am I . . . I actually, honestly, have no idea if I’m even vaguely understanding what’s happening.’ And yeah, I would definitely say that to John David. On the last day, I asked him a question about what was happening in a scene, and it was just so profoundly the wrong take on the character. And it was like, ‘Have you been thinking this the entire time?’ . . . There’s definitely a bond in the end in kind of hiding the fact that maybe neither one of us knew exactly what was going on. But then I thought, Ah, but John David actually did know. He had to know what was going on."
Nolan’s films often have a complex action scene that fans end up obsessively dissecting. InTenet, the action is relentless. After wrapping, Washington was physically wrecked, unable to run for more than a month.
“There were some times I couldn’t get up out of bed. A couple weeks in, I was worried, very concerned I wasn’t going to be able to finish this thing, and I didn’t want to tell anybody because I was like, ‘Oh, I will die for this,’ ” Washington says. “It was like, in the NFL, I felt like I needed to be there every day to keep my job, and I felt the same way about this. This film deserves it. Even if I break something, I am not going to say nothing to nobody until this thing gets done.”
