“He’s doing what I wanted to do”: The actor who makes Morgan Freeman “envious”
Having a long, distinguished, and illustrious career doesn’t necessarily mean it’s played out exactly as expected, with Morgan Freeman left to cast envious glances in the direction of another generational talent to have enjoyed success over a span of decades.
Even though Freeman had been performing on screen and stage since the early 1960s, it wouldn’t be until the late 1980s that he finally gained a foothold in cinema after securing a pair of Academy Award nominations at the tail end of the decade for his performances in Street Smart and Driving Miss Daisy.
From there, he became one of the most reliable and prolific stars in Hollywood, lending his gravitas and dulcet tones to a succession of critical darlings, crowd-pleasing smash hits, and awards season favourites, many of which rank among either the greatest or most popular films of the modern era – and in certain cases both.
While Freeman has collaborated with some of the most notable directors around – a list that includes Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, Clint Eastwood, David Fincher, and Rob Reiner, among others – he’s never been in a position where he can directly contact somebody, demand they find a spot for him in their next project, and then sit back and let it happen.
However, one of his former co-stars is capable of just that, and it turns him green with envy. Denzel Washington won an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ when they shared the screen in Glory, and he’s one of the very few names in the business who has their pick of the parts, not to mention the innate ability to alternate between prestige dramas and action thrillers at will and thrive in both.
As a result, when it was put to Washington that Paul Thomas Anderson had named him as the one performer he wanted to work with the most, he revealed he was already ahead of the curve and was seeking to rectify the situation. “Actually, I spent the day with Paul, I went to his house,” he shared. “You know, I thought about the top filmmakers, because I’m not going to do many more films. I know that. So I want to work with the best.”
When that information was relayed to Freeman in an interview with The Times, he conceded that he was “so very envious of Denzel’s career, because he’s doing what I wanted to do.” Freeman dreamed of reaching out directly to cinema’s most prominent auteurs and coming up with something they could work on together, but it never came to fruition to the extent he would have liked. Washington has been doing it for years, underlining that even icons with legendary careers of their own can get jealous sometimes.
