Denzel Washington is opening up about his past drug and alcohol use, admitting he’s “done a lot of damage” to his body. The Oscar winner, 69, has been sober for almost 10 years but got candid about his former vices in the Winter issue of Esquire . Washington said his unhealthy habits started with wine.
“Wine is very tricky. It’s very slow. It ain’t like, boom, all of a sudden,” he shared in the interview.
The “Gladiator II” actor explained, “I never got strung out on heroin. Never got strung out on coke. Never got strung out on hard drugs.
I shot dope just like they shot dope, but I never got strung out. “And I never got strung out on liquor. I had this ideal idea of wine tastings and all that — which is what it was at first.
And that’s a very subtle thing. I mean, I drank the best.” Washington shared that he had a massive wine cellar in his home and often blew through thousands of dollars on pricey bottles.
“I learned to drink the best. So I’m gonna drink my ’61s and my ’82s and whatever we had. Wine was my thing, and now I was popping $4,000 bottles just because that’s what was left,” he said.
“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.’” His wife, Pauletta, would often ask him why he’d only order two bottles at a time, to which he replied, “‘Because if I order more, I’ll drink more.’ So I kept it to two b.