John David Washington Couldn't Get Out of Bed After Filming Intense 'Tenet' Action Scenes

Photo credit: Warner Bros
Photo credit: Warner Bros

From Esquire

If you haven’t heard, Christopher Nolan isn’t the biggest fan of turning to the green screen for help with his action scenes. This is the guy who crashed replica Spitfires in the making of Dunkirk, and was running the Batmobile all around Chicago for The Dark Knight.

Apparently, whatever we’ve seen action-wise from Nolan before, it’s going to be multiplied tenfold for his newest film, Tenet, which is out on July 17. In interviews for Esquire’s summer cover story on Tenet star John David Washington, Nolan revealed that the time-warping espionage adventure will end up having the most action sequences he’s ever had in his directing career.

“The film has more action than any film I’ve ever done,” Nolan said. “It has a plethora of action sequences that [John David Washington took] the lead in. So he gets to do all kinds of different things. That athleticism also puts itself into the way he walks down the street and the way he talks and the way he moves.”

Even though, yes, Washington is more athletic than your average actor—he once held his college’s single-season rushing record, and even took a shot at the NFL—the filming of Tenet left a brutal physical toll. He tells us that he couldn't run for a month after filming some of these scenes.

“There were some times I couldn’t get up out of bed,” Washington said. “A couple weeks in, I was worried, very concerned I wasn’t going to be able to finish this thing, and I didn’t want to tell anybody because I was like, ‘Oh, I will die for this.’”

Washington, thankfully, was able to finish filming, which he added left him unable to run for a month. Given that Tenet is set to be one of our first big post-pandemic theatrical releases when it debuts on July 17, here’s hoping that all of the sacrifice will have been worth it. Washington seemed to think so.

“It was like, in the NFL, I felt like I needed to be there every day to keep my job, and I felt the same way about this,” he said. “This film deserves it. Even if I break something, I am not going to say nothing to nobody until this thing gets done.”

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