How Zach Braff ended up with Morgan Freeman on his voicemail: “I don’t believe it”
Imagine how cool it would be to have Morgan Freeman narrate the story of your life as you lived it, so you can pretend to be a penguin on a long walk, or maybe stuck in a 1940s prison that you need to escape from, or a detective solving seven horrible crimes with Brad Pitt.
Unfortunately, because he’s an Academy Award-winning A-lister, it would cost an absolute fortune to hire Freeman to do something so time-consuming and frivolous, so the best option you have is to do what Scrubs star Zach Braff did and basically blackmail him into recording your voicemail message.
Alright, blackmail might be a bit strong, but the two men did get into a bet thanks to their competitive natures while working on a little-remembered movie from 2017 called Going in Style, which, alongside Freeman, also starred other actors in the twilight of their careers like Back to the Future’s Christopher Lloyd, the late Alan Arkin and our very own Michael Caine.
The film was a remake of a 1979 heist comedy, telling the story of three elderly men who decide to rob a bank after their pensions get cancelled, and Braff was in the director’s chair. Freeman, who has 38 years on Braff and a fair bit more experience on film sets, was convinced he knew when the movie would wrap shooting, leading the youngster to make an unusual bet.
Braff recalled, “I go, ‘Morgan, I’m the director. I know when it’s your last shot. It’s your last shot’. He’s like, ‘I don’t believe it’. I said, ‘I’ll make you a bet’. He lost the bet because it was his last shot, so he had to do my outgoing voicemail message. It says, ‘Hello. This is Morgan Freeman. You have reached Zach Braff. He can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a message’.”
Which, to be honest, given Braff is a pretty creative fellow and the man who wrote and directed Garden State, is a little bit disappointing. Surely if you had the chance to have Freeman record your voicemail, you’d get him to say something like ‘Get busy living, or get busy dialling’ or something clever like that.
Regardless, Braff seemed pretty happy with winning the bet, but it didn’t stop the film from receiving some pretty mixed reviews, unfortunately.
Despite that, the film made a reasonably healthy profit at the box office and showed that it doesn’t really matter if most of your cast are over the age of 70 as long as the story is good enough, remake or not. Freeman has proved that himself by making another 15 movies in the years since Going in Style was released, including last year’s magic sequel Now You See Me: Now You Don’t alongside Jesse Eisenberg, which was a box office hit.
Now 89, Freeman has been working on a film called Hate To See You Go, which is about an ageing Chicago blues musician who refuses to retire and instead heads out on the road for one final tour. As for Braff, he has a movie coming out this year called Clean Hands, about a police sergeant trying to tackle drug dealing in his home town while his own daughter becomes a heroin addict. Fun!
