With Denzel Washington’s return to Broadway this week for the first time in seven years, he is revisiting a role he first played 48 years ago: Othello, the title character in one of Shakespeare’s most beloved tragedies. The two-time Oscar winner — who also earned a Tony Award in 2010 for his performance in a more recent classic, August Wilson’s Fences — first tackled the Moor of Venice at the tender age of 22, at Fordham University.
This time, Washington will be joined at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre — where previews of Othello began February 24, with an opening set for March 23 — by fellow stage and screen star Jake Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal is cast as Iago, the play’s antagonist and one of the most sinister figures in all of drama. The production is set in 2028 and is helmed by Kenny Leon — who has directed Washington twice before on Broadway, to raves. It marks a regular visit to a medium where both Washington and Gyllenhaal have thrived since becoming movie stars.
Washington got his start in the theater. “I think that still gives me the greatest joy, acting onstage as opposed to acting in movies,” he recently admitted to The New York Times. The star made his Broadway debut back in 1988 as his film career was surging into high gear, costarring with legends Paul Winfield and Ruby Dee in a comedy called Checkmate.
It was Shakespeare who brought Washington back to Broadway in 2005, for a production of Julius Caesar directed by Daniel Sullivan; the actor led the company as Brutus, the play’s complicated hero. (Washington had by then also tackled the Bard in a more sinister role, that of Richard III, in a 1990 Public Theater presentation, part of its popular Shakespeare in the Park series that year.)
Leon guided Washington back to the stage to even greater acclaim with a 2010 staging of a more contemporary classic: August Wilson’s Fences, which cast the actor as tragic hero Troy Maxson, a sanitation worker and former baseball champion, alongside Viola Davis as his wife. Both stars won Tony Awards, and the production scored a third trophy for best revival.
Four years later, Leon directed Washington as he played another leading character with dashed dreams: Walter Lee Younger, in a new staging of Lorraine Hansberry’s groundbreaking A Raisin in the Sun. The cast included other stage and screen favorites, such as Anika Noni Rose, David Cromer, and Stephen McKinley Henderson. It also marked the Broadway debut of Sophie Okonedo, who won a Tony, as did Leon and the revival.
Washington himself earned another Tony nomination for his next and most recent Broadway performance, as the charismatic, destructive Theodore “Hickey” Hickman in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. It was another starry staging that yielded additional nods for director George C. Wolfe, featured actor David Morse, and numerous designers.
Gyllenhaal, who has not previously performed Shakespeare, was already a full-blown movie star when he made his Broadway bow 10 years ago in Nick Payne’s Constellations, playing a beekeeper in a relationship with a physicist portrayed by Ruth Wilson, also in her Broadway debut. The production had transferred from Off-Broadway after the play premiered with different actors in London — where Gyllenhaal had gotten his theatrical feet wet in a 2002 revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth.
In 2017, Gyllenhaal plunged into musical theater, playing the title role in an acclaimed revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park With George, with then-rising star Annaleigh Ashford in the dual role of Dot, the artist’s lover and muse, and Marie, his daughter, revealed in old age.
Gyllenhaal returned to Broadway two years after that for Sea Wall/A Life, a pair of monologues that reunited him with Payne. Fellow screen star Tom Sturridge appeared in Sea Wall, by another celebrated British playwright, Simon Stephens, while Payne’s A Life cast Gyllenhaal as an anxious young father. Both actors were awarded Tony nominations, as was the double-hander, for Best Play.
In addition to his acting credits, Gyllenhaal has enjoyed success as a Broadway producer: Nine Stories, a company he cofounded with Riva Marker, received a primary production credit for Sea Wall/A Life, and later helped produce Jeremy O. Harris’s lauded Slave Play.
None of the characters Gyllenhaal has played on the New York stage to date comes as close to embodying pure evil as Iago, the solider who schemes to convince noble military commander Othello, falsely, that his wife, Desdemona, is being unfaithful, sealing the couple’s doom. The part has drawn several stars known to film fans, from José Ferrer, who played Iago back in the 1940s, to Christopher Plummer, who portrayed him in the last Broadway staging, back in 1982. Daniel Craig took on Iago for an Off-Broadway production directed by Sam Gold in 2016.
In the Times interview, Washington predicted that Gyllenhaal is “going to be brilliant in this. … He’s nuts. I love him. He’s complicated. But he’s already got a handle on it.”
Speaking with ABC Eyewitness News, Gyllenhaal was just as bullish on Washington, who follows such giants as James Earl Jones, Paul Robeson, Richard Burton, and John Gielgud — not to mention Orson Welles, Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Olivier, and Laurence Fishburne, in film adaptations — in playing the tragic hero.
“The process has been magical,” Gyllenhaal told ABC. “I watch [Washington] in the rehearsal room and he’s there before everybody and he leaves pretty much almost after everybody. He is there all day, [with] the same excitement every day and enthusiasm for the work. It is so inspiring.”