We’re talking about faith. Last December, just before Christmas, actor Denzel Washington was baptized and licensed as a minister, and so it hasn’t taken long, chatting about his return to Broadway playing the title role in Othello, for conversation to turn to matters of belief. Not religious, per se; Shakespeare’s great tragedy turns on themes of love and jealousy and betrayal. Perhaps, I muse, Othello’s choice to trust the evidence of his eyes—a planted handkerchief—over his innocent wife Desdemona’s protests that she has never strayed, is a kind of loss of faith, a misguided embrace of rationality over spirit. “Well, sure, he wants proof,” pipes up Jake Gyllenhaal, who co-stars in the production as Iago, planter of the aforementioned handkerchief, “and, Iago keeps leading him back to the handkerchief—look, look!—but the only reason he can manipulate Othello that way is that they have a bond. They’ve fought together, trusted each other with their lives. He knows this is a man with a great sense of faith and love.”
“Mm-hm,” adds Washington. Meanwhile, he’s picked up a thick binder and is flicking through it. We’re in a small midtown office a few minutes’ walk from the Barrymore Theatre, where the two actors will be performing in Othello through June 8—one of the starriest outings in what is shaping up to be a very starry Broadway season. In an hour or so, the pair is due at the theater for a meeting with the play’s director, Broadway veteran Kenny Leon, who staged a revival of Our Town at the Barrymore just last fall. Rain is pelting down outside as we chat, and Gyllenhaal seems to be keeping half an eye on it as he continues ruminating. “But Iago also knows, Desdemona—that’s something new for Othello. Which makes him vulnerable.”
“He’s not experienced putting all his cards on the table for one woman,” Washington chimes in, still focused on his binder.
“He’s been at war,” adds Gyllenhaal.
“Seven years of war,” adds Washington, citing the play. “So that’s his biography, right there. That’s where he’s comfortable. Battle.”
I feel like I’m in college. I say so. Gyllenhaal laughs. “This is what we do. It’s the best—going around and around, trying to figure out, who are these people? What makes them do what they do?”
“Ah!” Washington holds up his binder. He’s found what he was looking for: a page from his notes on the script, with a line of Othello’s scrawled in all caps: if she be false, heaven mocks itself. He flashes his iconic megawatt smile. “Talking about faith—that’s actually the first thing I wrote down,” he says. Then, from under his ballcap, he fixes me with an ardent gaze and says the line aloud, falling into character. “If she be false, O, then heaven mocks itself! I’ll not believe it!” I don’t feel like I’m in college anymore. A different, dreamier smile plays over Washington’s face as he quotes from elsewhere in the play. “For know Iago, but that I love the gentle Desdemona…”
Returning to himself, Washington grins, forms a finger pistol and aims it at Gyllenhaal. “Learning my lines! Finally catching up with this guy!”
In a manner of speaking, Gyllenhaal started learning his Iago lines seven months before rehearsals for Othello began in New York. “I’d never done Shakespeare,” he explains. “And you get that call and it’s, not only do I want to do this, I have to do this. But honestly, I didn’t know: can I do it? It scared me.”
Thus Gyllenhaal embarked on a five-day-a-week, two or three-hour-a-day Shakespeare training regimen not entirely dissimilar, I suggest to him, from the process of getting into fighting form for, say, Road House. “Sort of…” he assents, somewhat skeptical of the analogy. “You’re learning a language. And that top layer of, ‘what does this mean?’ you can get through pretty fast, but then the words, they’re so intense, what he’s actually saying—you can get lost in them. And the only thing I’m concerned about,” Gyllenhaal continues, “is being present and able to listen to one of greatest actors ever when we’re onstage.”
“And I’m seven months behind,” quips Washington, who—at time of writing, a week before opening night of previews—still wasn’t off-book.
“But you’re used to this, the words don’t get in your way,” notes Gyllenhaal. He glances over at me, then turns back toward Washington, gazing at him with not a little wonder. “He can say his lines like, you know, like they’re just coming out of his mouth…” Great acting, Gyllenhaal will later remark, is often a matter of doing as near as possible to nothing.
“Sometimes you’ll have this sort of explosion of inspiration from the word when you hear it,” says Gyllenhaal. “And sometimes you keep it as simple as you possibly can.”
“Well,” Washington offers with a shrug. “sometimes the line is just Shakespeare’s version of ‘get out of here.’”
For Washington, Othello is a homecoming. And a reunion. Twenty years ago, he played Brutus in a lauded Broadway production of Julius Caesar; his itch to do more Shakespeare wasn’t satisfied by his turn playing the title role in Joel Coen’s 2021 film The Tragedy of Macbeth. In the interim, Washington had struck up a fruitful collaboration with director Leon, with whom he’d worked on the Broadway plays Fences and A Raisin in the Sun. It so happened that Leon was fresh off mounting a production of Hamlet for Shakespeare in the Park—only his second staging of the Bard, after winning the 2020 Obie for his direction of Much Ado About Nothing—when Washington got it into his head to take a fresh crack at Othello, a part he first played half a century ago, as a 20-year-old drama student.
“I’ll tell you exactly what happened, we were doing Gladiator, and the young boy’s down on the Coliseum floor doing all the fighting,” Washington recalls, referring to the recent sequel starring Paul Mescal. “And all us old senators are sitting around in our gowns with our pinkies up, we’re extras basically, just talking, and someone brings up Othello. And I’m like, oh man, I wish, but I’m too old now. And one of the other senators says to me, no, no, no, go back and read the play…”
In the popular imagination, the ‘Other’-ness of “the Moor,” as Othello is often called, boils down to race. Yet as Washington points out, lines in the play suggest that the peculiarity of his marriage to Desdemona has as much to with age—she is young, whereas Iago refers to Othello as “an old black ram,” and Othello describes himself as having “declined into the vale of years.” (We don’t think about the age thing so much because Othello is so often played by vigorous men in the prime of life—to wit, James Earl Jones, long synonymous with the part, was 33 when he won an Obie for his performance in Joseph Papp’s 1964 production in Central Park.) Class is also a factor: Othello is an ex-slave-turned-soldier who has worked his way up, on the strength of his formidable talents, to a high-ranking military position; Desdemona is the daughter of a powerful politician in Venice, where the play is set. She’s sheltered; Othello is a man of the world.
Leon leaned into this last contrast with his casting, plucking a virtual unknown, 30-year-old Molly Osborne, to play opposite Washington, an actor who has surpassed mere celebrity to become one of the greatest leading men ever produced by Hollywood. “It’s surreal,” says Osborne, who’d been bouncing around the English theater scene for about a decade before she finally booked a West End show—Fiddler on the Roof directed by Trevor Nunn—and started the dominoes falling that ended with Leon hopping a flight to London to meet her in person. “That’s what they say, right? It only takes one part, and then you’re off,” Osborne says with a laugh, before going on to admit she was not expecting career takeoff, in her case, to lead her more or less straight into the arms of Denzel Washington. “It’s an honor just to be in the room. But you can’t just be awestruck—you have to do your job and be a good scene partner.”
Of course, being a little awestruck helps, when depicting someone in love. At the start of the play, Othello and Desdemona are utterly dazzled by each other. A question raised by the play is: why? Theirs is a pairing so out of the ordinary, it seems to demand to be justified. “We’re still finding it,” says Osborne. “Kenny’s re-named rehearsal ‘discovery,’ which I love, and that’s what we’ve been doing, discovering aspects of their relationship. Like, we know Othello’s told her all about his life—and in modern terms, maybe she’s the first person who’s really, you know, held him with that, held his trauma. It’s very pure. She sees his pain as part of what makes him beautiful. But maybe that also means she’s in denial of his darkness.”
As is common these days, Leon has time-shifted Othello out of Renaissance-era Venice and Cyprus. His version is set in 2028, and Othello and his troops are an occupying force of U.S. Marines—a battle-hardened band of brothers that find themselves suddenly, and as Gyllenhaal points out, dangerously idle. “You train these guys for combat, they go on mission after mission, then they’re waiting around, they’ve got nine months off—where are they going to put the target?”
“I wanted Jake because I knew he was going to search for the truth in the character,” says Leon. “I wanted humanity, not some mustache-twirling villain.” If ever a role tempted such a portrayal, it would be Iago, who Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously described as a “motiveless malignancy.” He schemes to destroy Othello, and drives him half-mad, and—spoiler alert—brings out Othello’s murder of his beloved wife, and his own eventual suicide, and again you wonder—why? Racism? Resentment about being passed over for promotion? Sheer boredom? No explanation is sufficient.
“I’m not sure I even understand what I’m doing, in the sense that, OK, Iago starts a ball rolling, but then it’s rolling faster and faster, and he has to start making choices that maybe he doesn’t even believe in, but there’s just no way back,” says Gyllenhaal. “Or that’s one interpretation.”
Another: the person Iago is actually trying to destroy is Desdemona, because that’s how he gets his beloved general, his Othello, back. “You talk about faith, and you talk about love, and really it’s heartbreaking, because I do believe that Iago loves Othello, deeply,” Gyllenhaal continues. “Admires him.”
“At war, these two men, it was like they were one person,” Washington interjects.
“And then they get to Venice and he meets Desdemona and I’m losing it,” Gyllenhaal concludes.
“It’s easy to say Othello is gullible,” adds Washington. “No, no, no—he trusts this man more than he trusts anyone in the world. He trusts him with his life.”
If love is a conspiracy of two, impenetrable to outsiders, Iago finds a way to pierce through, seeding doubt about Desdemona in Othello. In so doing, he establishes a competing conspiracy, and the men draw closer. “I am your own forever,” Iago vows in Act III, marriage-like. The play doesn’t work if Othello and Iago don’t read as authentically intimate. Judging by the easy rapport between Washington and Gyllenhaal, they won’t struggle to find that camaraderie onstage.
“We’ve been asking ourselves, who was Othello, who was Iago before the wars? Because we’re trying to understand, you know, what here is what war’s done to them, versus what’s their actual essence?” says Washington.
“That’s a part of the play that speaks directly to today,” he goes on. “You send these men and these women out to fight for freedom, they’re going to come back changed. PTSD. Something. They’ve got scars.”
There’s a simple logic behind Leon’s choice to set the play in 2028, rather than the here-and-now: he’s aiming for resonance, not “relevance.” “This is a play about the struggles of all time,” he says. “The struggle to be a human—to love, to trust, to be curious, to grow, to heal, all of that; take away everything except what makes us naked, pure human beings, that’s how people can find themselves in this story.” What Leon hopes to avert is Othello being pinned down, butterfly-like, to a political position, or forced onto one side or another in this country’s seemingly never-ending culture wars. It will be hard to avoid—the moment is fraught; the play has an interracial couple at its heart; what is racism, if not a “motiveless malignancy?” People will chew on the Broadway first of an Othello directed and lead-produced by black men—Leon and Brian Anthony Moreland, respectively—and cut their assumptions about that to fit their pre-existing views. But becoming grist for hot takes is very much not the point. “When Denzel came to me a year-and-a-half ago and said, I’ve got free time in 2025, we didn’t know who’d be sitting in the Oval Office, we didn’t know what’d be in the news—and it didn’t matter,” notes Leon. “Shakespeare wrote this play more than four hundred years ago. This is about our time on the planet.”
And anyway, there’s something about Othello that rebuffs reduction. When I chat with Molly Osborne, for example, she mentions that she and Leon imagine Desdemona as the daughter of a prominent American political dynasty—“and she’s rejecting all that.” But almost immediately upon saying this, Osborne doubles back, and adds, “there’s more to their love, of course; it’s not explainable. It’s just—love is love.”
Washington echoes this syntax when he details what Leon is seeking from his actors’ performances. “No pinkies up, no ‘Shakespearean acting,’ I don’t even know what that is. You think that’s what people were like four hundred years ago? You think that’s how they went around the corner to get coffee? No,” Washington posits, shaking his head. “Just truth. And the truth is the truth. That’s what Kenny says, the truth is the truth.” And knowing when you’ve touched that is matter not of mind, but of feeling—of faith, you might even say. A surrender to the sublime mysteries of the human heart.
“I keep watching him, thinking, how do I do that? Because it’s not as simple as ‘keep it simple,’” Gyllenhaal says, peering at Washington. “And then the answer is just—be great. That’s it, be great.”
Washington breaks into a belly laugh, wags a finger at Gyllenhaal. “Look at you, ready for opening night…you’re Iago-ing me already.”
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Photoshoots & Outtakes > Sessions > Photoshoots From 2025 > Session 1 [Vogue]
