In a rare interview, the Hollywood legend reveals why he has long been envious of Denzel Washington. He reflects on life, Sidney Poitier — and why Black History Month is an insult.
Morgan Freeman has played Nelson Mandela, the US president (three times) and, of course, God. He is, as you would expect, thoughtful and humble. He even sports a grey beard. On Instagram his biog says: “That actor whose voice you recognise” — and, aged 85, he still talks like low, rumbling thunder.
Only one thing shocks me. And it’s not his two gold earrings. It is that, after years of trying, I’m finally talking to him. Freeman, the embodiment of 60 years of Hollywood history, has not given an interview in decades.
He is chatting to me from his home on the Alabama Gulf coast, because of A Good Person, a film he has made with the young British star Florence Pugh. The reviews have been, shall we say, mixed — far from the peak Freeman of The Shawshank Redemption, Unforgiven, Glory, Invictus, Driving Miss Daisy, Seven and Million Dollar Baby. He plays Daniel, a former cop who suffers a tragedy and must bring up his granddaughter. Yet the melodrama has its tender moments, especially when Freeman and Pugh share a screen.
It is, at least, Freeman’s 117th film. Nobody seems sure how many he has made. How does he pick them? “Sometimes you just work to pay the rent,” he says. Perhaps this is why he avoids interviews. Then he expands. “When my career started in film I wanted to be a chameleon. I remember De Niro early on, doing very different parts. Almost unrecognisable as the same actor. I had opportunities like that. But as you mature in this business, eventually you become a star. Then you’re pretty screwed in terms of referring to yourself as a character actor. You play a lot of the same type of role — people hire you and say, ‘It’s you that I want.’ And you live with it.”
So these days he is hired as a star, rather than as an actor? “Exactly. I don’t think I’ve done much in the last 10 years that was much different. Driving Miss Daisy and Glory were different. Now? It’s just . . . me. The character will adapt itself to you rather than the other way round, so I do what piques my interest. Sometimes it’s just the money alone.”
Well, this is honest. In A Good Person Freeman is, you will not be surprised to learn, something of an old sage. But, because he doesn’t need more money, he must enjoy these samey parts? “Well, yeah, it’s what I do. Is that an answer? If I don’t do this I don’t do anything. And if I don’t do anything I might as well lie down.” So, you don’t like being bored? “Hmm, boredom,” he ponders, smiling. “A job is the break in the boredom.”
He veers wildly from the dismissive to the profound. When I ask what he brings to his new role, he says that people read too much into preparing for a part. “Learn the lines and they will speak for the whole job,” he insists. “On Shawshank actors felt they had to go into prison to find out what that’s like. Well, actually, you don’t.”
Then we talk about a line when his character Daniel says, “There are things that are impossible to forgive.” The film pushes the idea that the best aim in life is to, simply, be a good person. “Yes,” he says, taking his time. “The world does not promise you forgiveness. You have to try to live your life in such a way that you don’t need to be forgiven.” His voice cracks a bit. “Being thanked is much better than being forgiven.” No wonder people have cast him as God.
Freeman was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1937 — one of four to his mother, Mamie, a teacher, and his father, Morgan, a barber. It was the era of segregation and his great-great-grandparents were slaves. He recalls his early childhood as being “hot summer days, running, dust and sweat”, before the family moved to Chicago when he was six. By 13 he knew he wanted to act and, after four years in the air force, started acting classes in Los Angeles in 1959. He had an acclaimed theatre career and four years on the children’s TV show The Electric Company before, finally, the Hollywood big time called in 1989. He was 52.
It must have taken guts to keep on going. “I agree,” he says. “But you meet people who say, ‘I always wanted to do that.’ But they didn’t because, if they did, it’s what they’d be doing.
“People ask, ‘What would you be doing if you didn’t make it?’ I don’t know. Driving a limo? But I would be in community theatre. I would be acting. But along with guts it also takes luck. You need courage and serious luck. I credit my career with both.”
He can also credit changes in America. His career started in the final stretch of the Hays Code — a censorship list of what films were allowed to show. It banned, among other things, “ridicule of the clergy” and interracial relationships. It was dropped only in 1968, at a time the civil rights movement was making it easier for black actors to be cast in roles that used to go only to white actors.
“When I was growing up there was no ‘me’ in the movies,” says. “If there was a black man in a movie he was funny. Until Sidney Poitier came and gave young people like me the idea that, ‘OK, yes, I can do that.’” For an early big role in 1987′s Street Smart he played a pimp called ‘Fast Black’. He never played that type of character again. “I was really terrified of being trapped,” he recalls. “It’s so easy to get trapped somewhere — I was very conscious of that.”
“I did get offers to repeat that Street Smart character, but it was not a good idea. Some actors will always be bad guys or good guys. I didn’t want to be like that, which you will become if you keep taking the same roles over and again.” He pauses. That is what he said his work is like now . . . “But, as I say, if you stay long enough eventually that will be your bread and butter.”
Surely he has ambition left? His friend Denzel Washington told me that, now he is in the “autumn of life”, he is phoning prestige directors like Paul Thomas Anderson and Steve McQueen to ask to work with them. Freeman, 17 years Washington’s senior, does not do the same. “I am so very envious of Denzel’s career, because he’s doing what I wanted to do.” He sounds rather defeated. “And I spoke with Sidney way back. He said, ‘I wanted to be like you.’” He sighs. “Generationally, though, I do think we’re moving ahead in leaps and bounds.”
I mention a television interview with Freeman in 2005, in which he said the only way to get rid of racism was to stop talking about it. “I’m going to stop calling you a white man,” he told the white host, “and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.” I ask if he still feels the same.
“Two things I can say publicly that I do not like,” he begins, a rare moment when he raises his voice. “Black History Month is an insult. You’re going to relegate my history to a month?”
“Also ‘African-American’ is an insult. I don’t subscribe to that title. Black people have had different titles all the way back to the n-word and I do not know how these things get such a grip, but everyone uses ‘African-American’. What does it really mean? Most black people in this part of the world are mongrels. And you say Africa as if it’s a country when it’s a continent, like Europe.”
He settles again. His point is that people talk about Irish-Americans or Italian-Americans, not Euro-Americans. I mention Washington again, who said: “I’m very proud to be black, but black is not all I am.” I sense Freeman thinks the same. “Yes, exactly. I’m in total agreement. You can’t define me that way.”
This is as controversial as he gets. The Succession actor Brian Cox lavished praise on him in his memoir and called him “the Freeman you encounter in your dreams”. He finds this hilarious. “Oh, Brian! Good on him!” One director, Robert Benton, said of him: “You cannot act moral fibre — you either have it or you don’t. He truly has that quality.”
Even his #MeToo scandal was mild. In 2018 the actor was accused by CNN of being “overly flirtatious” with various female production crew on set. Freeman said sorry to everybody who felt “disrespected”, with some of CNN’s sources turning against the report and peers rushing to his defence, while acknowledging he has old-fashioned ways.
I bring it up gently. He has been an actor for longer than his character in The Shawshank Redemption was in prison. What has changed? “The change is that all people are involved now,” Freeman says. “Everyone. LGBTQ, Asians, black, white, interracial marriages, interracial relationships. All represented. You see them all on screen now and that is a huge jump.”
The conversation meanders. He has a lot of stories and is, perhaps, at his most poignant when talking about Dana Ivey, his co-star on stage in Driving Miss Daisy. He was chosen for the film version that was his Hollywood breakthrough, but the studio picked Jessica Tandy for Daisy and Ivey’s CV remains minor in comparison.
“It’s luck of the draw,” he says. The screen jolts. Our Zoom is malfunctioning. A flicker of many Freemans appears. The 117th, 118th, 119th time I’ve seen him on screen. He needs to reboot “if you have time?” I do. Do you, Morgan? “I’ve got time.”
- A Good Person is on Sky Cinema from April 28
Milestone movies you can watch now
To Sir, With Love (1967) Prime Video
A tough, white, inner-city London school takes on a novice black teacher — played by Sidney Poitier — and gives him a rough welcome. A microcosm of Britain at the time, and Poitier makes his mark.
In the Heat of the Night (1967) Apple TV
Three years after the US Civil Rights Act, Poitier is a Philadelphia cop arrested in the Deep South — pretty much for being black. Soon he is fighting small-town prejudice in this searing Hollywood classic.
The Shawshank Redemption (1994) Apple TV
Morgan Freeman’s character, Red, was a white Irishman in Stephen King’s novella. He steals the show in a film that grew by word of mouth. Top billing goes to Tim Robbins as the wronged man, but Freeman makes the movie his own.
Million Dollar Baby (2004) DVD
Freeman won an Oscar for his role as a former boxer who sees Hilary Swank’s potential in this poignant sports drama. Again he plays second fiddle — this time to Clint Eastwood — but Freeman gives a knockout performance.
Malcolm X (1992) BFI Player
A biopic about the radical civil rights leader, Malcolm X, starring Denzel Washington, was a landmark, paving the way for films about black icons from Martin Luther King to Muhammad Ali.
Training Day (2001) Prime Video
Washington won an Oscar for his role as a charismatic cop in a tense, violent thriller — it is the sort of chameleon part, one imagines, Freeman means when he says that he is jealous of his friend’s career.
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London