©2016 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. and Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Two-time Oscar winner Denzel Washington can be seen this weekend in the highly anticipated remake The Magnificent Seven. It’s the first Western in the acclaimed actor’s long career.
Rather than the seven helping to defend a Mexican town from bandits as in the 1960 original — itself a remake of Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai — the new seven, led by Denzel’s Sam Chisolm, are mercenaries hired by widow Emma — played by Haley Bennett — to wrest an American town from a corrupt industrialist, played by Peter Sarsgaard.
Washington had to learn to ride a horse and handle a six-shooter, like any self-respecting gunslinger of the time.
“You just practice,” Denzel said on Good Morning America of flipping around the firearms. “All day, every day…You’re with your horse every day, you know, I like that.”
Washington leads a diverse cast of heroes, including Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, who’s Mexican; Martin Sensmeier, a Native American; and South Korean Lee Byung-hun. Ethan Hawke, Vincent D’Onofrio and Chris Pratt. “It actually speaks to the reality in the 1870s,” Denzel said of the diverse lineup. “That’s more typical than you know, movies of the 50s and 40s, where there’s nobody [that] looks like us…But we were there.”
“I can’t speak for the director,” Denzel said of the diverse casting choices, “but it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we were going to do this for that reason.” Perhaps signaling a box office changing of the guard, Washington then joked, “I just wanted to be in Chris Pratt’s movie.”
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