John David Washington, son of Denzel, is a football player turned actor, and his dad used to pull from his famous movie monologues to inspire his team.

As a football coach for John David’s youth games, Denzel would gather the team to give an “impassioned speech,” Esquire reports. John David says the words often sounded familiar: “This is from the ‘Malcolm X’ speech, right?”

In the upcoming cover story, he talks tackle football — in the seventh grade. When he was hesitating before contact, his father had him hit a punching bag again and again. “It was like a scene straight out of ‘He Got Game,’ in which his dad played the father of a star basketball prospect,” Kate Storey reports.

Denzel is just as encouraging about his son’s acting — including when he’s only there in spirit. At the first table read of Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” in Lee’s office, sitting in the same chair his father sat in to read for “Mo’ Better Blues” with a poster of Denzel hanging above, John David recalls, “That’s when it hit me: ‘OK, if I mess this up, my career is basically over’ … The pressure hit for a moment, for those two hours, and then I was back. I was OK after.”