The actor that helped shape Morgan Freeman: “I just marvel”
While plenty of movie stars have gained worldwide fame in their 20s, 30s, and occasionally even teenage years before maintaining that status for decades to come, Morgan Freeman had to wait a lot longer than the typical A-lister before he secured his spot.
Although he’d been acting since the early 1960s, it wasn’t until he was on the cusp of turning 50 that Freeman landed his big break on the silver screen when he secured the first Academy Award nomination of his career for playing a vicious pimp in Street Smart. In an instant, though, the doors had been kicked wide open.
Two years later, he earned his second Oscar nod and first in the ‘Best Actor’ category for Driving Miss Daisy before lending support in blockbuster adventure Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, timeless prison drama The Shawshank Redemption, and classic crime thriller Seven. A decade previously, he was nowhere near a household name, but by the middle of the 1990s, he was one of the industry’s most popular stars.
That put Freeman in the position of being able to work with actors and filmmakers he’d previously admired from afar. He got a solid two for the price of one deal when he was directed by Clint Eastwood in ‘Best Picture’ winner Unforgiven, which earned Gene Hackman the prize for ‘Best Supporting Actor’.
He’d already been a fan of Eastwood’s work on either side of the camera before they’d even met, and as he explained to The Guardian, Hackman was also somebody who inspired him greatly. “He’s a movie actor, boy, he’s an actor, and every time I go see him, I just marvel at him,” he offered. “When I go to movies, not only am I being entertained, but I am also being trained as an actor because I am shameless in my thievery.”
Beyond stealing his tricks and techniques to incorporate into his own approach, Freeman and Hackman struck up a firm friendship that saw them spend years searching for another project to do together, which they eventually found almost a decade after Unforgiven in 2000’s mystery thriller Under Suspicion.
The illustrious duo both served as producers, and it was an invitation Freeman didn’t need to think twice about. “He is one of those people who instruct me, whom I look up to, whom I think is one of the masters of his craft that I am so enamoured of,” he said. “But if Gene says, ‘Morgan, here’s a piece that I would like us to do.’ I mean, it’s Gene Hackman.”
It was an invitation he was never going to turn down, and while Under Suspicion wasn’t as good as it should have been looking at its powerhouse central pairing, at least it gave Freeman the chance to spend more time with a friend and performer who helped inform his view of acting as a whole.
