'I learned more about my body than I knew': John David Washington gets his action-hero moment with 'Tenet'

He rushed for more than 3,500 yards at Morehouse College in the 2000s and was an NFL running back with the Rams for a spell. Still, all his football accomplishments didn’t prepare John David Washington for what he likes to call “Christopher Nolan training camp.”

Washington blossoms as an honest-to-goodness big-screen action hero in Nolan’s mind-bending, physics-spouting spy thriller “Tenet” (now showing nationwide where theaters are open), the “BlacKkKlansman” actor’s first big-budget film and the first major movie to hit theaters shuttered by COVID-19. Starring as a rookie secret agent known only as The Protagonist, who has to stop a Russian oligarch (Kenneth Branagh) from dooming humanity, Washington had his mettle tested during several of Nolan's signature action sequences.

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“I’ll be honest, I was really confident about my athletic abilities and I was extremely confident that I would get the job done, maybe even underestimating how tumultuous that path to mastering inverted techniques would be because of my football background. But I learned the hard way and I learned early, too,” says Washington, 36, laughing.

Huge defensive linemen and linebackers tackling him is one thing. But bungee-jumping off a building – when he's admittedly not very good with heights – is the sort of thing that challenges spirit and pride.

“This is it: I'm doing this for the art, I love it, and if this is the way to go, at least I did it on a Christoper Nolan set,” Washington recalls thinking. “I was scared.”

And because the film hinges on the concept of time inversion, Washington had to learn to say some of his lines backward ("It was almost like learning a new language") and do fight scenes going forward and backward in time.

“I learned more about my body than I knew,” Washington says of that two-month training process before filming started. “In football, you're always taught to go forward, move the ball forward, as they say, ‘move the chains.’ And in this case, moving the chains means going backwards. It means going the opposite of what you're used to doing: Left means right, right means left. It was all these new rules of what success is.”

The actor, who's the son of Denzel Washington, is still learning what that means in Hollywood, too. Growing up, he had small roles in two of his dad’s movies, Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X” (1992) and “Devil in a Blue Dress” (1995). A torn Achilles tendon in 2013 ended his football days but switched his focus to the family business: Washington starred opposite Dwayne Johnson in five seasons of HBO’s “Ballers,” playing a mercurial receiver in the twilight of his career, and scored Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations for Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman."

Washington’s performance, as a 1970s cop infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan, won Nolan over when he saw the film at Cannes Film Festival and appreciated “the way he drew me into that story,” the director says. With “Tenet,” Nolan needed a powerful presence to carry the film and felt Washington’s athleticism did wonders: “The whole crew is there on set, watching this guy perform extraordinary things and just thinking, ‘Wow.’ Suddenly, he owns the movie."

Washington is “just one of the greatest collaborators I've worked with: extraordinarily hard-working, very, very thoughtful, and very considerate of everybody around him in the most wonderful way,” Nolan adds. That’s another lesson that his star learned on the football field: “I understand the importance of teamwork and how no one is bigger than the team,” Washington says. “We all listen to our head coach.”

Now if he could only see “Tenet” in a theater. His “dream” is to bring his family and friends to the cinema and watch it, “safely of course.” Washington already has his concessions order ready: “Popcorn and Welch's fruit snacks.”

While Hollywood is just getting around to restarting, Washington has been busy. He filmed a secret movie in quarantine, “Malcolm & Marie,” with “Euphoria” creator/director Sam Levinson and co-star Zendaya.

“You can call it a passion project for a whole bunch of different reasons, especially given the time that we're in now,” Washington says. He won’t divulge any plot points or a release date, but confirms that safety protocols were followed and “we really didn't think about it when when we got going.”

Washington says he's getting used to the new mask-wearing, social-distancing normal – and again, life comes back around to the gridiron.

“There's no quick errand anymore. You've got to prepare to run an errand. You got to put your armor on,” he says. “Like when I used to play football, you can't play without your helmet. That's how I think about it: If I want to go play the game, I've got to wear my helmet.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Tenet': John David Washington is Christopher Nolan's new action hero