Actor Denzel Washington has been dishing out wisdom and truth like Skittles with promotion of his film Fences. After scolding Hollywoodites who whine about the "difficulty" of making a movie while people send their sons to Iraq, he has now declared the cult of celebrity overrated. 

The two-time Academy Award winner spoke about the hard work of his father, and how that should be more highly regarded in this society than celebrity.  

"My father worked 50 years for the water department, he was also a minister and he worked three jobs all the time," Washington told the New York Post’s Page Six. "He made it, he was successful. Celebrity is really overrated — we don’t want anything to do with celebrity. I am an actor."

Washington made these statements just one week after a roundtable discussion with The Hollywood Reporter where he spoke of how Hollywood should stop complaining about the difficulty of making films, which is a luxury compared to what others have to go through. 

I was a garbage man, like Troy [his character in Fences]. You get eight hours' worth of work, but you can do it in three. So you can go home as soon as you finish. Post office, you get three hours of work and you make it last eight. I did both. I liked being a garbage man better. But they weren't bad jobs. People say, ‘Oh the difficulty of making a movie.’ I say, ‘Send your son to Iraq. That’s difficult.' It’s just a movie. It’s like, relax. I don’t play that precious nonsense. Get outta here. Your son got shot in the face? That’s difficult. Making a movie is a luxury. It’s a gift. It’s an opportunity and most importantly it’s a gift. Obviously everybody here is talented enough to do that. But don’t get it twisted.

Fences opens on Christmas Day and tells the story of a former baseball star turned garbage collector as he struggles with race relations and family drama in 1950s Pittsburgh.