The actor Morgan Freeman completely worships: “I’ve been praying at the temple”
Actors come and go in Hollywood like the waves lapping the shoreline. While the majority are carried out in the tide of Tinseltown, some remain. To stick around for even a few years is good going in the cut-throat world of making movies, but Morgan Freeman has managed to not only remain in the game but dominate it for decades now.
One of the most well-known actors of all time, Morgan Freeman has been in the business for half a century and has played everyone from Julius Caesar to Nelson Mandela to God. He’s won Academy Awards, Golden Globes, and Emmys, shared the screen with Brad Pitt and Clint Eastwood, and worked with pioneers such as Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan. Freeman’s prominence on our screens throughout the years has led to him becoming a household Hollywood name.
When reaching such a status, from the outside, it is easy to assume that the tremendous icons of pop culture aren’t themselves fans of the industry they are in. After five decades in the business and with few performers able to match his CV, even Morgan Freeman has other actors he admires.
Detailing some of those who have inspired him, the actor shared: “I think we all have a private bucket list. It may not be written down, but I’m constantly checking them off. I just checked off Jack Nicholson”. Working with Nicholson on the Rob Reiner film The Bucket List in 2007, Freeman stated that “every day was a holiday because I’ve been praying at the temple of Jack ever since Five Easy Pieces“.
Nicholson is one of few actors who can claim as successful and sweeping a career as Freeman. After his breakout role in Easy Rider in 1969, he went on to become the most Academy Award-nominated male actor in history. Perhaps his most influential and memorable role is his haunting performance in Stanley Kubrick’s iconic adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining in 1980. Since then, he turned down a role in the film’s sequel, Doctor Sleep.
While his resume is impressive, Nicholson’s real command comes in his cultural relevance. Breaking out at a time in cinema history that proved to be both incredibly rebellious and creatively fruitful, Nicholson’s position as a keystone in the resurgence of expressive cinema means he is often cited as a gargantuan figure in the industry.
Freeman continued to praise Nicholson, sharing: “I had a chance to ride with him on the Warner Brothers plane with Clint [Eastwood]. I got to jawing what a fan I was, and as actors do, he expressed how he liked my work. Then we started talking about how we could make a sequel to The Last Detail. But that didn’t pan out.”
The 2007 film dramedy followed the two men as they meet while fighting lung cancer and try to complete their bucket lists together. During an interview with Collider in 2007, Freeman shared that he enjoyed the script but stipulated that Nicholson had to be in the film for him to do it.
In the same interview, Nicholson shares his mutual admiration for his costar: “Morgan and I have known one another at a distance for a long time and had always known we wanted to work together, and that’s pretty much all it took for me.”
Nicholson continues to detail Freeman’s elusive nature: “He’s a mysterious man, Morgan. I sort of wondered how we got on so well. We hadn’t seen as much of each other over the years… The man moves. He flies. You never know where he is. He’s a man of mystery. No doubt about it.”
With their near-equal accolades and sizeable impacts on Hollywood, it’s no surprise that Freeman and Nicholson had it on each other’s bucket lists to work together. The two movie moguls are otherwise peerless in their industry.
