We’re talking about faith. Last December, just before Christmas, actor Denzel Washington was baptized and licensed as a minister, and so it hasn’t taken long, chatting about his return to Broadway playing the title role in Othello, for conversation to turn to matters of belief. Not religious, per se; Shakespeare’s great tragedy turns on themes of love and jealousy and betrayal. Perhaps, I muse, Othello’s choice to trust the evidence of his eyes—a planted handkerchief—over his innocent wife Desdemona’s protests that she has never strayed, is a kind of loss of faith, a misguided embrace of rationality over spirit. “Well, sure, he wants proof,” pipes up Jake Gyllenhaal, who co-stars in the production as Iago, planter of the aforementioned handkerchief, “and, Iago keeps leading him back to the handkerchief—look, look!—but the only reason he can manipulate Othello that way is that they have a bond. They’ve fought together, trusted each other with their lives. He knows this is a man with a great sense of faith and love.”
“Mm-hm,” adds Washington. Meanwhile, he’s picked up a thick binder and is flicking through it. We’re in a small midtown office a few minutes’ walk from the Barrymore Theatre, where the two actors will be performing in Othello through June 8—one of the starriest outings in what is shaping up to be a very starry Broadway season. In an hour or so, the pair is due at the theater for a meeting with the play’s director, Broadway veteran Kenny Leon, who staged a revival of Our Town at the Barrymore just last fall. Rain is pelting down outside as we chat, and Gyllenhaal seems to be keeping half an eye on it as he continues ruminating. “But Iago also knows, Desdemona—that’s something new for Othello. Which makes him vulnerable.”
“He’s not experienced putting all his cards on the table for one woman,” Washington chimes in, still focused on his binder.
“He’s been at war,” adds Gyllenhaal.
“Seven years of war,” adds Washington, citing the play. “So that’s his biography, right there. That’s where he’s comfortable. Battle.”
I feel like I’m in college. I say so. Gyllenhaal laughs. “This is what we do. It’s the best—going around and around, trying to figure out, who are these people? What makes them do what they do?”
“Ah!” Washington holds up his binder. He’s found what he was looking for: a page from his notes on the script, with a line of Othello’s scrawled in all caps: if she be false, heaven mocks itself. He flashes his iconic megawatt smile. “Talking about faith—that’s actually the first thing I wrote down,” he says. Then, from under his ballcap, he fixes me with an ardent gaze and says the line aloud, falling into character. “If she be false, O, then heaven mocks itself! I’ll not believe it!” I don’t feel like I’m in college anymore. A different, dreamier smile plays over Washington’s face as he quotes from elsewhere in the play. “For know Iago, but that I love the gentle Desdemona…”
Returning to himself, Washington grins, forms a finger pistol and aims it at Gyllenhaal. “Learning my lines! Finally catching up with this guy!”
In a manner of speaking, Gyllenhaal started learning his Iago lines seven months before rehearsals for Othello began in New York. “I’d never done Shakespeare,” he explains. “And you get that call and it’s, not only do I want to do this, I have to do this. But honestly, I didn’t know: can I do it? It scared me.”
Thus Gyllenhaal embarked on a five-day-a-week, two or three-hour-a-day Shakespeare training regimen not entirely dissimilar, I suggest to him, from the process of getting into fighting form for, say, Road House. “Sort of…” he assents, somewhat skeptical of the analogy. “You’re learning a language. And that top layer of, ‘what does this mean?’ you can get through pretty fast, but then the words, they’re so intense, what he’s actually saying—you can get lost in them. And the only thing I’m concerned about,” Gyllenhaal continues, “is being present and able to listen to one of greatest actors ever when we’re onstage.”
“And I’m seven months behind,” quips Washington, who—at time of writing, a week before opening night of previews—still wasn’t off-book.
“But you’re used to this, the words don’t get in your way,” notes Gyllenhaal. He glances over at me, then turns back toward Washington, gazing at him with not a little wonder. “He can say his lines like, you know, like they’re just coming out of his mouth…” Great acting, Gyllenhaal will later remark, is often a matter of doing as near as possible to nothing.
“Sometimes you’ll have this sort of explosion of inspiration from the word when you hear it,” says Gyllenhaal. “And sometimes you keep it as simple as you possibly can.”
“Well,” Washington offers with a shrug. “sometimes the line is just Shakespeare’s version of ‘get out of here.’”
For Washington, Othello is a homecoming. And a reunion. Twenty years ago, he played Brutus in a lauded Broadway production of Julius Caesar; his itch to do more Shakespeare wasn’t satisfied by his turn playing the title role in Joel Coen’s 2021 film The Tragedy of Macbeth. In the interim, Washington had struck up a fruitful collaboration with director Leon, with whom he’d worked on the Broadway plays Fences and A Raisin in the Sun. It so happened that Leon was fresh off mounting a production of Hamlet for Shakespeare in the Park—only his second staging of the Bard, after winning the 2020 Obie for his direction of Much Ado About Nothing—when Washington got it into his head to take a fresh crack at Othello, a part he first played half a century ago, as a 20-year-old drama student.
