The co-star Morgan Freeman had been dying to work with since 1983: “I’m one of his huge fans”
The bigger the star, the more likely they are to be given the leeway to handpick their co-stars. Morgan Freeman wasn’t quite in that bracket, though, so he had to bide his time patiently instead.
People like Denzel Washington have the clout to approve their colleagues, as Angelina Jolie discovered back in the late 1990s, but the shoe has frequently been on the other foot with Freeman, not that it’s held him back, since one phone call from Clint Eastwood gave the veteran everything he’d ever wanted.
Having already been a fan of the actor and filmmaker’s work, with The Outlaw Josey Wales one of his all-time favourite movies, Freeman had been dreaming of the chance to collaborate with Eastwood, and he got it. On the other side of the coin, he had to wait 30 years to spar with the scene partner he’d always wanted to work with.
Interestingly, one of the Academy Award winners’ most frequent co-stars has been the equally legendary Michael Caine, with the pair sharing the screen in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, Going in Style, and a pair of Now You See Me flicks. Long before that, they’d both watched the same 1983 movie and reached the same conclusion.
When Caine laid eyes on the picture’s leading man, he knew “there was something special about him.” As for Freeman, the first time he saw it, he knew that he was “born to do this.” They’d both turn out to be right, since that fresh-faced young fella was Risky Business‘ Tom Cruise, and since they didn’t get any facetime in Goldmember, the latter is the only one who got to work with the perennial A-lister.
Took him a while, though, with Joseph Kosinski’s 2013 sci-fi blockbuster, Oblivion, affording the Shawshank favourite the platform. When asked what drew him to the film, there was only one answer. “Tom Cruise,” he replied. “I mean, it’s a Tom Cruise movie.”
It didn’t matter what it was; if Freeman was offered the chance to work on anything in any capacity with the Top Gun and Mission: Impossible mainstay, he’d take it. “If I was going to be a truck driver hauling supplies, I would have taken the job,” he admitted. “I’m one of his huge fans. I have been for I don’t know how many years. Way, way back.”
Fortunately, the star’s penchant for imbuing even the most leaden exposition with gravitas was why he was hired for the gig, not his ability to drive a truck. As Oblivion‘s Malcolm Beech, Freeman doesn’t get much else to do apart from standing around and being awfully Morgan Freeman, but that was more than enough to keep him happy.
All he wanted was the chance to stand opposite Cruise and have a little back-and-forth dialogue, an opportunity he’d been waiting on since the first time he saw the youngster skid across the silver screen in his kecks in Risky Business three decades previously, underlining that good things do come to those who wait.
