“I did go to Las Vegas”: Morgan Freeman’s hilarious response to the news of his own death
It’s been a running joke for decades that Morgan Freeman was born as an old man, and he’s now reached the point in his life where he’s a really, really old man.
The Academy Award-winning actor will turn 90 years old in June 2027, but he’s still going strong, even if his workload has slowed down significantly in recent years, as you’d expect from someone who’s only a whisker away from becoming a nonagenarian.
Freeman has been playing wizened sages for the last four decades, and as he’s gotten older, he’s only become wiser and more sage-like, with his silky smooth cadence making even the most leaden exposition feel as though it’s been delivered from above, such is the power of that unmistakeable voice.
He’s appeared in 11 movies and four TV shows in the last five years alone, which also makes him one of Hollywood’s most prolific veterans, and unlike his friend and frequent co-star Michael Caine, The Shawshank Redemption favourite has absolutely no plans to draw a line under his career.
As morbid as it sounds, the only thing that will stop Freeman from stepping in front of the cameras is death, but even that didn’t stop him, since he had a measured, graceful, and altogether hilarious reaction to the news that he had, in fact, passed away in October 2012.
Death hoaxes are a frequent thing, and he’s been the subject of a few of them over the years, but the best way to squash a story is to get out in front of it, with the star stopping the media frenzy in its tracks by popping onto social media and informing the world that he was still alive and kicking.
“Like Mark Twain, I keep reading that I have died,” he wrote. “I hope those stories are not true. But if they are, I’m happy to report that my afterlife seems identical to my life when I was alive.” Luckily, he wasn’t trapped in some kind of purgatory that looked an awful lot like his everyday existence, and he even found the time to head to ‘Sin City’.
No, Freeman was not dead, and beyond reminding everyone of that fact, he also shared that, “I did go to Las Vegas to begin work on the film Last Vegas. That is anything but a death sentence.” Instead of being six feet under, he was on his way to the casinos to hang out with Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas, and Kevin Kline.
The movie was shite, right enough, but it was a damned sight better than pushing up daisies. Vegas or the great beyond? For him, there was only one correct answer.
