There is one “astounding” filmmaker Morgan Freeman has always been desperate to work with
In his career, Morgan Freeman has worked with a laundry list of the greatest filmmakers to ever ply their trade in Hollywood.
From Clint Eastwood to Christopher Nolan, and from David Fincher to Steven Spielberg, Freeman has added them all to his list of directorial conquests. Heartwarmingly, though, he has never lost his desire to work with the people whose work excites him, even as an old-timer who has seen and done almost everything in the movie business.
Indeed, it was one day in 2018 when Freeman first encountered the work of a man he soon came to think was an “astounding” filmmaker. Like huge swathes of the US, Freeman sat down to watch Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone, and soon found himself becoming increasingly addicted to the Sicario scribe’s modern western tale, which starred his old Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves buddy, Kevin Costner. In fact, he found it almost impossible not to press play on the next episode every time the previous one ended.
“I’m like everybody else,” Freeman told Collider in 2024. “I started watching Yellowstone, and I just got to make it to the next season, the next show.” As Freeman fell deeper and deeper down the Yellowstone rabbit hole over the next couple of years, he was delighted to discover that Sheridan was also making the spinoffs 1883 and 1923, which delved into the adventures of previous generations of Costner’s Dutton clan.
These shows were like watching an old school Hollywood epic, complete with modern production values and weighty themes, every single week, and Freeman was struck by the quality of Sheridan’s writing. “He comes up with these other shows,” the Se7en star marvelled, “and the writing is so catchy. You’re grabbed by the very writing itself. The man is astounding.”
In one way, Freeman’s effusive praise for Sheridan is unsurprising, as the man has built himself a TV and movie empire in the last decade that few people can hold a candle to. His muscular, gritty, old-fashioned storytelling style has taken movies like Hell or High Water to the Oscars, and nabbed millions of eyeballs on Paramount+, whose subscribers eagerly eat up whatever TV project comes off his conveyor belt next: Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa King, Landman etc.
On the other hand, though, despite Sheridan’s work being insanely popular, and chock full of iconic Hollywood talent – Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren, Nicole Kidman, Billy Bob Thornton, Jeremy Renner, and Sylvester Stallone, to name just a few – you’ll very rarely see his shows covered by mainstream industry media, or garnering the attention of the Emmy Awards. His oeuvre seems to have been tagged as retrograde by many, and right-wing by others, despite Sheridan himself vehemently denying that he makes “red-state” or “conservative” shows.
Whatever the case, Sheridan has a fan in Freeman, and when he approached the iconic star about joining his TV universe, he leaped at the opportunity. When asked why he signed up for the action show Special Ops: Lioness, based loosely on a real-life military programme, he instantly answered, “It’s a Taylor Sheridan project, and I’m just, number one, thrilled to be in that loop.” To date, Freeman has starred in two seasons of the show alongside Kidman and Zoë Saldaña, and it would be a shock if he weren’t to reunite with Sheridan, the man he considers so astonishing, for the upcoming third season.
