Jack Nicholson’s absurd suggestion for the modern-day James Dean: “I told him when I first met him”
Even though they were born just six years apart, Jack Nicholson and James Dean feel like stars of two completely different eras, which admittedly isn’t too far from the truth.
By the time the latter made his feature debut playing the lead role in 1958’s The Cry Baby Killer, it had already been three years since Dean passed away at the age of only 24. However, the latter’s early demise gave rise to a mythology that embedded him in the fabric of pop culture as one of Hollywood’s most enduring icons.
Dean only received three film credits in his brief yet successful career, but it was still enough to earn him a Golden Globe win and an Academy Award nomination. East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant combined to make him the face of three generation-defining classics and the poster child for a star that burned brighter than most for the shortest time.
It wasn’t until the late 1960s that Nicholson’s star began to take off, and because he was an immersive actor with a mischievous glint in his eye and a penchant for bad boy behaviour, it wasn’t long until he started earning comparisons to both Dean and his idol and future neighbour Marlon Brando.
Of course, the three-time Academy Award winner was one of a kind and balanced his hard-partying antics with top-tier performances, making him an elite-level actor in front of the camera and an infamous hell-raiser away from it. He survived and thrived through multiple eras and countless industry upheavals, so it stands to reason that he’d be well-placed to single out the second coming of Dean.
He did that, even if his candidate was about as ridiculous as it gets. Casper Van Dien and James Franco both played Dean, and Leonardo DiCaprio was under consideration for what would have been an awards-baiting biopic. Was it one of them who took his fancy as Dean reincarnated, or was it another of Hollywood’s bright young things who balanced good looks and charisma with raw talent? Nope, it was Morgan Freeman.
“I told him when I first met him,” Nicholson explained to Cinema. “I said, ‘You know, Morgan, this might be something somebody didn’t say about you, but I consider you the modern James Dean’. He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m talking about this one thing’. There’s acting, and there’s cinema.”
According to Nicholson, “Dean had this quality” that he shares with Freeman: “When they wear a hat or a coat or whatever, you don’t see a graphically non-telling image of Morgan, ever. I mean, he doesn’t have to do much, and he does plenty. But, I mean, I don’t think he’d heard that about himself.”
From Nicholson’s perspective, Dean and Freeman both shared the innate ability to look, dress, and act the part without letting their persona overshadow the role. Everybody knew who they were, but as soon as they emerged from the costume department and the cameras were rolling, any airs and graces were completely dropped in the name of performance.
Freeman is a legend, without a doubt, but James Dean? For one thing, he was 70 years old when Nicholson tried to make his point, almost three times older than Dean had ever lived to be. Plenty of actors have been compared to Dean for better and worse, but The Shining star might be the only one who used Freeman as the modern-day measuring stick.
