Denzel Washington tells it like it is. Though not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination, he lacks the arrogance, vapidity, and radi cal leftism peculiar to Hollywood personalities.

Instead, he tends to speak the truth as he sees it in a reasonable, rational way that’s quite unlike what’s normally associated with Hollywood. Such was the case back in 2016 when actors were patting themseIves on the back and saying that making a movie was like going to a w ar zone yes, really.

Well, Denzel demolished that lie during an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, saying People say ‘the difficulty of making a movie.’ Well, send your son to Iraq. That’s difficult. It’s just a movie, relax. I don’t play that precious nonsense. Your son got shot in the face? That’s difficult. Making a movie is a luxury. It’s a gift. But don’t get it twisted, it’s just a movie.”

Denzel’s comments might have been a response to Tom Cruise, who had been somewhat misleadingly quoted in 2013 as saying that filming a movie was brutaI like a tour of duty in Afghanistan.

The Hollywood Reporter was involved in that story too, reporting: Don’t underestimate the work that Cruise does. As far as he’s concerned, acting is like competing in the Olympics, and sometimes like fighting in Afghanistan.

I train, you know, I’ve studied, you know, professional athletes, Olympians, in order to, you know, a sprinter for the Olympics, they only have to run two races a day,” Cruise expIains.

When I’m shooting, I could potentially have to run 30, 40 races a day, day after day.

Cruise is later asked about his lawyer’s equating of his absence from Suri to that of a soldier’s absence from his family while fighting in Afghanistan. While the actor says he didn’t hear that comment, filming his last movie felt like being at w ar.

I didn’t hear the Afghanistan, but that’s what it feels like, and certainly on this last movie, it was brutaI. It was brutal, Cruise says. TMZ had reported on the same quote about the filming being “brutal”, though it somewhat unfairly characterized Cruise as having said that fiIming the movie was like war. It later had to amend the article to reflect the fact that that wasn’t really the case, as Snopes reports, saying: