“It was a lesson on me”: the 2014 movie Morgan Freeman was convinced would be a “piece of shit”
Based on his filmography, especially in recent years, Morgan Freeman has absolutely no aversions to starring in a movie that can justifiably be called a piece of shit.
There’s a reason why the likes of The Minute You Wake Up Dead, The Poison Rose, The Ritual Killer, and the rest of the straight-to-video nonsense he’s been cashing a paycheque to appear in were never considered for a theatrical release, and you’d assume that he wouldn’t even try to claim otherwise.
He’s taken a lot of roles purely for the money, and some of them have been good, but that doesn’t make it any less ironic that one of his credits earned almost half a billion dollars at the box office, launched a money-spinning franchise, and received nominations from the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, and Grammys, despite Freeman being convinced that it would be awful.
Even though he’s got one of the most unmistakably iconic and soothing voices in cinema history, which had already been put to good use as a narrator extraordinaire, the Oscar-winning veteran didn’t make his debut voice performance in an animated film until 2014’s The Lego Movie, where his gravitas made him the perfect fit to play Vitruvius, a wizard who regularly dispenses much-needed wisdom.
Since he’s not an actor known for knocking back lucrative offers, it was a head-scratcher that nobody had thought to offer one of cinema’s most sonorous stars a voice-only gig before. Then again, after he’d signed on the dotted line and stepped into the recording booth for the first time, his expectations for Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s flick were firmly in the gutter.
When asked if he had an inkling that The Lego Movie would be so rapturously received and widely acclaimed, Freeman couldn’t be faulted for his honesty. “No!” he replied. “Piece of shit!” His feelings didn’t change after his first day, by which point he was beginning to regret his decision.
“I went to the studio, and I had seen the publicity around other animated movies, and you see two or three actors in the studio interacting with each other,” he recalled. “I come to the studio, and there’s nobody there but me and these two young writers. I said, ‘Well, OK, fine. What?’ So the first day was dry, they were feeding lines, and I was reading off of the script: “Oh, well. OK, fine.'”
He got into the swing of things eventually, though, and by the time he settled into his groove, he finally began to enjoy himself. By the time he’d finished his recording sessions, Freeman was no longer convinced that The Lego Movie would be a piece of shit. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“It just got better and better,” he reminisced. “It was a lesson on me.” That said, it remains the one and only time that he’s voiced a character in an animated movie, so even though he got the hang of it after a few days, it still might be an experience he isn’t keen on replicating.
