Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington recently talked about his past struggles with alcohol, which he has been free from for ten years. Washington, who starred in the sequel Gladiator II, explained his experience with alcoholism, including drinking two bottles of wine a day, as reported by Relevant.
“Wine was my thing,” Washington wrote in a new Esquire article, “and now I was popping $4,000 bottles just because that’s what was left. And then later in those years, I’d call Gil Turner’s Fine Wines & Spirits on Sunset Boulevard and say, ‘Send me two bottles, the best of this or that.’ And my wife’s saying, ‘Why do you keep ordering just two?’ I said, ‘Because if I order more, I’ll drink more.’ So I kept it to two bottles, and I would drink them both over the course of the day.”
He also mentioned that in 1999, he built a wine cellar in his house that could hold around 10,000 bottles and spent a lot of money to hide his addiction.
“I had this ideal idea of wine tastings and all that, which is what it was at first,” the actor explained. “And that’s a very subtle thing. I mean, I drank the best. I drank the best.”
“I’ve done a lot of damage to the body,” he continued. “We’ll see. I’ve been clean 10 years this December. I stopped at 60, and I haven’t had a thimble’s worth since. Things are opening up for me now – like being 70. It’s real. And it’s OK. This is the last chapter – if I get another 30, what do I want to do? My mother made it to 97.”
In 2017, Washington shared that his mother was key in helping him get sober.
“My mother said to me when I was 59, she said, ‘Denzel, you do a lot of good. You have to do good the right way, and you know what I’m talking about,'” he said. “I don’t drink anymore; I don’t do any of those things. I’m all about the message … You have to be unafraid and unashamed to share it in the way your millennial generation knows how.”
He compared his alcoholism to how young people are now addicted to social media.
“We better understand that we are addicted to this [he said, holding up a phone],” he said. “It’s not its fault; it’s a magnification and a reflection of our own free will … I pray for your generation … What an opportunity you have! Don’t be depressed by it because we have to go through this; we’re here now. You can’t put that thing back in the box.”
