Morgan Freeman’s favourite movie role: “It was more alien to who I really am”
In the slimming pantheon of living Hollywood legends, Morgan Freeman joins Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson as a legend of immortal proportions. His eminence may not stretch back quite so far, but following a big-screen breakthrough in the 1970s, he grew from strength to strength with seminal work on projects by iconic filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, and Eastwood himself.
Freeman is best known for his voice of milk and honey that never fails to comfort the viewer, whether he’s narrating Stephen King’s tale of hope and despair in The Shawshank Redemption or a picturesque struggle for Antarctic survival in March of the Penguins. However, there are many more strings to his bow.
As a Black man from the Midwest, Freeman is a blues aficionado and enjoys celebrating the genre’s rich cultural history. In 2001, he opened Ground Zero, a blues club in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the genre’s historical epicentre. Although he dabbles in musical performance, Freeman sadly hasn’t released any blues records, but one can imagine how his voice might suit some of those classic Muddy Waters standards.
Freeman’s affinity with the blues tradition seems to permeate his cinematic career. In many of his classic roles, such as Driving Miss Daisy, The Shawshank Redemption and Unforgiven, he evokes the stoic warmth and sense of historic poignance for which the blues are beloved.
Freeman even brought his powerful sense of timeless wisdom to his role as God in Bruce Almighty alongside Jim Carrey. In this role, he essentially played himself at ease. However, he is certainly not a one-trick pony. Freeman’s career contains a wide range of roles spanning the ages and demanding disparate emotional approaches.
Whether portraying veteran police officer William Somerset in Se7en or Azeem in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Freeman often finds roles as the good guy. This is perhaps the most tangible constant in the actor’s half-century movie career. “For the most part, I’ve played good guys, wise, shit like that,” Freeman noted in 2023. He added that he “doesn’t have a thing about playing a bad guy” but just seems to be mildly typecasted.
In one of Freeman’s extremely rare “bad guy” roles, he portrayed the pimp Leo “Fast Black” Smalls in the 1987 crime thriller Street Smart. Directed by Jerry Schatzberg with a cast also featuring Christopher Reeve, Kathy Baker and Mimi Rogers, the plot revolves around an ambitious reporter who fabricates an interview with a pimp. As a consequence of the interview, Fast Black is indicted for murder, leading to his and the prosecutor’s quest for revenge against the reporter.
As a morally corrupt, violent and vengeful pimp, Freeman’s character is far from the “good guy” with whom he’s associated. However, the plot poses Fast Black as an anti-hero, so his “bad guy” role could have been much worse. Despite the movie’s box office failure, Freeman earned Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for his performance and considers it a major breakthrough in his career.
Reflecting on the movie as one of his career favourites, Freeman noted how he sought a challenging character far from his own personality. “I went as about as far away from me as I could get in terms of acting,” he said. “Everything else — you know — you pull something out of you. Not that I wasn’t pulling stuff out of me in terms of my action with the ladies, but to me, it was more alien to who I really am.”
