Health and fitness coverage of Gladiator II, Ridley Scott’s belated Roman empire sequel, has so far focused on Paul Mescal’s gym regime and glut of chicken.

But it appears the shoot also spurred something of a wellbeing overhaul for his co-star, Denzel Washington, who lost a substantial amount of weight ahead of the shoot, thanks to Lenny Kravitz.

Washington wrote in a long first-person piece in Esquire magazine: “About two years ago my good friend, my little brother, Lenny Kravitz, said, ‘D, I wanna hook you up with a trainer.’ And he did, and he’s another man of God.

“I started with him February of last year. He makes the meals for me and we’re training, and I’m now 190-something pounds on my way to 185. I was looking at pictures of myself and Pauletta at the Academy Awards for Macbeth, and I’m just looking fat, with this dyed hair, and I said, ‘Those days are over, man.’ I feel like I’m getting strong. Strong is important.”

Washington also opened up about cutting out alcohol 10 years ago after a long period of overindulgence that began in the late 1990s.

“Wine was my thing,” Washington writes, “and now I was popping $4,000 bottles just because that’s what was left. And then later in those years I’d call Gil Turner’s Fine Wines & Spirits on Sunset Boulevard and say, ‘Send me two bottles, the best of this or that.’ And my wife’s saying, ‘Why do you keep ordering just two?’ I said, ‘Because if I order more, I’ll drink more. So I kept it to two bottles, and I would drink them both over the course of the day.”

Washington said he built a 10,000 bottle wine cellar in his house in 1999, and attempted to mask his habit with high-end spend.

“I had this ideal idea of wine tastings and all that,” he wrote, “which is what it was at first. And that’s a very subtle thing. I mean, I drank the best. I drank the best.

“I’ve done a lot of damage to the body. We’ll see. I’ve been clean. Be 10 years this December. I stopped at 60 and I haven’t had a thimble’s worth since. Things are opening up for me now – like being 70. It’s real. And it’s OK. This is the last chapter – if I get another 30, what do I want to do? My mother made it to 97.”

Washington’s performance as a ruthless power broker in Gladiator II appears to be the film’s surest bet for an Oscar nomination. But he declared himself uninterested in the awards race in the same article, saying that his best actor loss to Kevin Spacey in 2000 (Washington was nominated for The Hurricane) made him “bitter” about such prizes.

The actor had already won one Oscar (for Glory) and scored three nominations, but the defeat affected him profoundly, he said.

“At the Oscars, they called Kevin Spacey’s name for American Beauty. 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.”

In 2002, Washington won the leading actor Oscar for Training Day, and has been nominated in the same category a further four times since then.

“I went through a time then when [my wife] Pauletta [Washington] would watch all the Oscar movies,” he wrote. “ I told her, I don’t care about that. Hey: ‘They don’t care about me? I don’t care. 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 15 years, from 1999 to 2014 when I put the beverage down, I was bitter.”