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Denzel Washington: '5-Star Experiences Are Hard To Come By'

But the "Equalizer 2" star admits this one thing earns it.

In his first ever sequel, The Equalizer 2, Denzel Washington’s Robert McCall is a highly trained vigilante who drives for Lyft by day and beats criminal ass by night. His co-star, Ashton Sanders plays Miles, a talented, well-meaning teenager who lives in McCall’s building but has fallen in with the wrong crowd. For a Lyft driver, receiving a five-star rating is the next best thing to getting an actual monetary tip. It says that this was a near flawless execution of their agreement (you were on time, your car didn’t smell, the temperature was comfortable and you didn’t talk my ear off).

While Washington and the team are celebrating being the No. 1 movie in the country, he told BET.com that handing out perfect scores in real life is not too easy.

“Five-star experiences are hard to come by,” he says with a head tilt. “Five-star? Because you start thinking about it and say, ‘That wasn’t that GOOD. That was like 3.9.” But he finally answers after a moment. “Whatever my wife fixed last. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. My wife’s fried chicken. That’s five stars! Period. Period! Six stars!”

Ashton, however, has a very specific five-star experience that he wanted to share:

"I got some really good rest last night and I have a Tempur-Pedic bed and Tempur-Pedic pillows. A number four Tempur-Pedic bed. And that was a five-star rest.”

“So you’ll have 18 beds when you get to the house,” Denzel joked.

“I guess so.”

The Equalizer 2 is the first sequel that Washington has ever done, but it’s something he didn’t think much about until he was asked.

“That’s something I’ve been asked about today but it never came up. I haven’t really been asked to do any and I haven’t found any that I wanted to do. It’s as simple as that,” he says of why he hasn’t done one until now. “That only other movie that I think I was asked was Safe House, and they wrote a prequel to it and was like [*Scrunches face*], Nah man, he’s dead. That don’t make no sense. It didn’t make sense for me. No, no, there was another movie, too, that I’ll leave out [that] they wrote a sequel to but I didn’t do it.”

Antoine Fuqua, who has worked with Denzel since 2001’s Training Day, says convincing Denzel to do a sequel came down to the script.

“Richard Wenk wrote a good script, and he wrote one that could stand on its own separate from the second. Todd Black and the producers had their work cut out to convince him. He was more or less let me think about it and let me read it. Then he called me and we talked about it. As long as it can stand on its own, he was into it. It’s fun to see him beat a little ass.”

The Equalizer 2 is in theaters now!

 

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