Denzel Washington Admits He Felt Bitter After Losing the Best Actor Oscar to Kevin Spacey: “I’m sure I went home and drank that night”

Denzel Washington is looking back on how he felt after losing the Best Actor Oscar to Kevin Spacey in 2000. The Gladiator II star, who had already won one Oscar and earned three other nominations before that ceremony, was nominated again for playing Rubin Carter in 1999’s The Hurricane.

He competed against Spacey for American Beauty, Russell Crowe for The Insider, Richard Farnsworth for The Straight Story, and Sean Penn for Sweet and Lowdown. In the end, Spacey took home the award, though Washington did win the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama that year.

“At the Oscars, they called Kevin Spacey’s name for American Beauty,” Denzel remembers. “I have a memory of turning around and looking at him, and nobody was standing but the people around him. And everyone else was looking at me. Not that it was this way. Maybe that’s the way I perceived it. Maybe I felt like everybody was looking at me. Because why would everybody be looking at me? Thinking about it now, I don’t think they were.”

Washington continued, “I’m sure I went home and drank that night. I had to. I don’t want to sound like, ‘Oh, he won my Oscar,’ or anything like that. It wasn’t like that. And you know, there was talk in the town about what was going on over there on that side of the street, and that’s between him and God. I ain’t got nothing to do with that. I pray for him. That’s between him and his maker.”

Denzel Washington had already won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for 1990’s Glory. The Hurricane was his second time being nominated for Best Actor, as he was also nominated in 1993 for Malcolm X but lost to Al Pacino for Scent of a Woman.

“I went through a time then when [my wife] Pauletta [Washington] would watch all the Oscar movies — I told her, I don’t care about that. Hey: ‘They don’t care about me? I don’t care,’” he recalls. “You vote. You watch them. I ain’t watching that. I gave up. I got bitter. My pity party. So I’ll tell you, for about fifteen years, from 1999 to 2014 when I put the beverage down, I was bitter.”

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