Morgan Freeman picks his least favourite movies: “Did any of you see this? Don’t”
Most actors would love to treat their careers as purely artistic pursuits, only signing on to movies to fulfil their deepest creative desires. However, that’s not how the movie business works, and acting is a job, after all. Sometimes, actors find themselves making movies for the money – and Morgan Freeman has made plenty of those films in his career. However, he’s also taken part in acclaimed movies that people love, but he has a personal beef with, as well as prestige productions he knew were doomed from the get-go. In truth, they’re all his least favourite Morgan Freeman films.
A quick look at Freeman’s career reveals that he has been taking roles in blockbusters since the early ’90s. However, he wasn’t always able to pick the good ones, and when he tried to subvert expectations by being a villain for one project during the mid-90s, it all went pear-shaped.
During a 2000 conversation at the National Film Theatre in London, Freeman spoke about trying to avoid being pigeonholed as noble, wise, dignified characters – and this was why he signed up to play a thief in the 1998 action thriller Hard Rain. It was a calculated risk – a $70million high-concept movie which was easier to get greenlit than one of his character films, and it would allow him to show audiences he could turn his hand to villainy. Unfortunately, these same audiences refused to accept Freeman as a bad guy.
You see, Freeman’s armed robber was supposed to die at the end of Hard Rain without getting his mitts on the money he was trying to steal. It was the comeuppance his character deserved – but test audiences still wanted him to get away with it because he’s Morgan Freeman. Ultimately, the studio decided to go with the audience’s wishes and changed the ending so that Freeman’s character survived and got away with some of his ill-gotten gains.
Freeman wasn’t happy with this outcome, though, so much so that he urged the crowd at the NFT to avoid Hard Rain entirely. He grumbled, “Did any of you see this movie? Don’t, just don’t.”
A much more beloved blockbuster also rubbed Freeman the wrong way, though. When he thinks of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, his abiding memory is pain. He once revealed, “During filming, I jumped off a wall and my knee went backward. So, I remember standing in the mud in the cold with this pain running up my leg and hip. They got me an osteopath to try to work it out. He never could.” To be fair, that’s enough to sour most people on any experience.
Freeman was bitterly disappointed with 1992’s The Power of One, a film he thought read amazingly well as a script. Once it was up on the big screen, though, he realised, “It wasn’t as good as I had hoped. I can’t say particularly why, but I wasn’t as moved as when I was reading the script.”
The iconic star also has no love for The Bonfire of the Vanities, the regrettable 1990 disaster from director Brian De Palma. He once said, “I knew that movie wasn’t going to work.”
He felt De Palma didn’t have a clue what he was doing with the black comedy and was also aggravated with how he got the part of Judge Leonard White in the first place. Alan Arkin had been cast initially, but then the studio decided to – in Freeman’s words – “be politically correct and make the judge black. So they fired Alan Arkin and hired me. Not a great way to get a role.”
Perhaps most shockingly, though, Freeman also has mixed feelings on one of his most beloved films: The Shawshank Redemption. He didn’t see eye-to-eye with director Frank Darabont, who routinely asked his cast for multiple takes. In a retrospective feature for Vanity Fair, Freeman mused, “Acting itself isn’t difficult. But having to do something again and again for no discernible reason tends to be a bit debilitating to the energy.”
Freeman also hated the movie’s title and blamed that for its dismal box-office performance. He told Seth Meyers, “Nobody could say ‘Shawshank Redemption.’ What sells anything is word of mouth.”
