“It was an unscripted assault”: the 2012 co-star who forced a kiss on Morgan Freeman
As a prolific veteran actor, there aren’t many things that Morgan Freeman hasn’t done onscreen, but one of his biggest regrets is that nobody ever seemed interested in casting him as a romantic lead.
He’s played heroes, villains, politicians, presidents, pimps, prisoners, God, and almost everything else in between, but at no stage in his career has a producer or filmmaker looked at him and thought, “Now there’s the perfect guy to take centre stage in a frothy and frivolous rom-com.”
Freeman has been in a couple of movies that are adjacent to the genre, but neither Feast of Love or 5 Flights Up cast him as a single man who jumps through all of the usual hoops: the meet-cute, the first date, the fallout, the reconciliation, the happy ending, and every other staple rom-com trope.
Arguably the closest he got was Rob Reiner’s 2012 dramedy, The Magic of Belle Isle, where he plays a wheelchair-bound, alcoholic author who fell out of love with his profession when he became a widower, only for Virginia Madsen’s single mother to appear in his life when he spends the summer at a picturesque cabin.
It’s not necessarily a romantic picture, with the bond between them largely platonic, but the Academy Award winner was nonetheless taken aback when his co-star deviated from the script, ignored the peck on the cheek that had been written, and delivered a full-fledged smacker right on his mush instead.
“She’s supposed to get up and come and give me a kiss on the cheek,” Freeman explained. “Instead, she gets up and plants one right on my lips, a good one, you know? And I was so surprised, that the reaction on my face was that… Rob says it was priceless. I was stunned, really, I really was.”
An improvised moment, but not one he was necessarily against. “Virginia’s a very attractive lady,” he noted. “We were doing fine in the scene, and then the whole movie was just going along.” Then again, his unpreparedness meant that it didn’t leave the greatest impression in the immediate aftermath.
“It was an unscripted assault,” Freeman noted. “And it changed the entire tenor of the movie. I did the best I could. It wasn’t like we rehearsed it, you know? She decided, ‘I’m doing this’, and got up and followed her muse, whatever it was at the time.” In Hollywood, nobody bats much of an eyelid when a kiss happens between two actors with a 25-year age gap, unless you’re not prepared for it, apparently.
Being a romantic leading man may have eluded him, and it always will unless somebody fancies hiring a guy who’s knocking on 90 to headline a rom-com, but when Madsen skipped the cheek and went straight for the figurative jugular, Freeman’s shock suggests that maybe he’s not cut out for it anyway.
