“It was a role I fought not to get”: the movie Morgan Freeman never wanted to make
Any actor who isn’t an established name isn’t in a position to turn down a part in any movie, regardless of how big or small the role is. Morgan Freeman was years away from his big break, but he still tried to excuse himself from playing a character he really wasn’t interested in bringing to the screen.
He’d been working solidly in film, television, and theatre since the early 1960s, but it wasn’t until Street Smart became his Academy Award-nominated calling card that Freeman took off. Before then, he was best known as the guy from The Electric Company, and being associated more with a children’s TV series than anything else isn’t the best way for anybody to enhance their position in Hollywood.
One of his earliest notable big-screen outings came in Stuart Rosenberg’s 1980 prison drama, Brubaker, which faced a difficult road to production. Despite having Robert Redford in the title role, it was far from smooth sailing after Bob Rafelson was fired as the film’s director, which led to him filing a $10 million lawsuit against 20th Century Fox for breaching his contract.
Coincidentally, Rosenberg had previous form in the prison genre, after previously helming Cool Hand Luke, which starred Redford’s most famous onscreen collaborator, Paul Newman. Freeman was only the sixth-billed name in the ensemble as an inmate named Walter, but as he shared with The AV Club, he needed some convincing before he signed on the dotted line.
“To tell you the truth, it was a role that I fought not to get,” he explained. “In the script, this guy that I played weighed 240 pounds, and he could tear a toilet off a wall! Bob Rafelson was the original director, and he asked me to play the role, and I said, ‘Man, no! That’s not… I can’t even pretend to be somebody who can do stuff like that! No, thank you.’ But, you know, it finally happened.”
Even though Freeman had already turned it down, once Rafelson had been dismissed and replaced by Rosenberg, his arm was twisted. What made him change his mind? In a fashion befitting an Oscar-winning icon who’s never shied away from telling it like it is, there was one reason, and one reason only convinced him to play Walter: “Money.”
Brubaker didn’t provide the greatest showcase for his talents, but it was the first time Freeman had appeared in a major theatrical release for seven years, so it didn’t hurt. The film also turned a tidy profit at the box office and landed an Oscar nomination for its screenplay, and when you combine that with the enhanced paycheque that swayed him, things worked out pretty well for the actor.
Of course, financial gain has become a running theme in Freeman’s filmography, and out of all the money jobs he’s taken over the years, Brubaker is comfortably the least egregious, which isn’t saying much when it’s got things like Dreamcatcher, the Has Fallen franchise, and Ted 2 as its main competition.
