NEW YORK:

Actor Russell Crowe says he will never forget the first time he met Denzel Washington and accidentally spit on him.

The two had worked together in Virtuosity in 1995 when Crowe was still a struggler and he still gets embarrassed when he recalls his screen test. Washington was already famous. Imdb.com reports him saying, “I was doing a screen test and Denzel already had the gig. We had a cyclone wire fence between us and the scene was pretty intense. They said, ‘Action!’ and I started going into it. And this little bit of spit comes out of my mouth, wound its way through the cyclone wire and straight onto Denzel’s lip. In the back of my mind I’ve got this voice going, ‘Oh my god, what have you done?’ He was really cool about it. It was my screen test, so he just let it run (until) the director said, ‘Cut!’ His line, which I’ll always remember as cool, he said, ‘I love the taste of saliva in the morning!’”