Denzel Washington Reflects on Past Drug and Alcohol Use: 'I've Done a Lot of Damage to the Body'

Denzel Washington is closing in on a decade of sobriety, saying he “didn’t have a thimble’s worth of” quitting when he turned 60.

The Gladiator II star — who turns 70 next month — looks back on his relationship with alcohol in the winter issue Esquire, where it graces the cover.

It started, he tells the outlet, with wine. “Wine is very tricky. It’s very slow. It’s not like, boom, at once”.

“I was never addicted to heroin. I’ve never gotten high on cocaine. I was never burdened with hard drugs. I was doing drugs just like they were doing drugs, but I never got high,” he told the publication. “And I never got drunk on a drink. I had this ideal idea about wine tastings and all that — which at first it was. And that is a very subtle thing. I mean, I drank the best.”

Denzel Washington appears on the winter cover of ‘Esquire’.

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He said that when his family added a wine cellar to their house, “I learned to drink the best. So I’ll drink my ’61 and ’82 and everything we had. Wine was my thing, and now I was throwing away $4,000 bottles just because that’s what was left.”

“And then later in those years I would call Gil Turner’s Fine Wines & Spirits on Sunset Boulevard and say, ‘Send me two bottles, the best of this or that.’ ”

When asked by his wife Pauletta, to whom he has been married for more than 40 years, why he keeps ordering two bottles, Washington replied, “Because if I order more, I’ll drink more.” ‘That’s why I reduced it to two bottles and would drink both during the day.’

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Denzel Washington in September 2014.

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While he says “I never drank while working or preparing. I would clean up, go back to work — I could do both. No matter how many months of filming, powder, it’s time to go. Then, boom. Three months of wine, and then it’s time to get back to work.”

He shared that he “didn’t drink while we were filming Flight,” a 2012 drama in which he played an alcoholic airline pilot, but “I’m sure I did as soon as I finished. That was near the end of the drinking, but I knew a lot about waking up and looking around, not knowing what happened,” he said Esquire.

Looking back, Washington says, “I did a lot of damage to the body. We’ll see. I was clean.”

“Things are opening up for me now – it’s like I’m seventy years old. It’s real. And it’s okay. This is the last chapter — if I get another thirty, what do I want to do? My mother made it to ninety-seven. I’m doing the best I can.”

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Source: HIS Education