The only actor who left Morgan Freeman starstruck: “Jesus fucking Christ”
It takes a lot to leave Morgan Freeman feeling starstruck, with the Academy Award-winning veteran having been around long enough and achieved enough success that he’s spent decades in a position where actors can be left daunted and overawed by meeting him.
After all, the legend has surrounded himself with fellow legends both onscreen and off. In addition to being able to call Clint Eastwood, Michael Caine, and Gene Hackman personal friends, he’s worked with icons like Steven Spielberg, Angelina Jolie, Tom Hanks, Dustin Hoffman, Jodie Foster, and countless more.
For the most part, Freeman treats them as colleagues, co-stars, peers, and contemporaries, and no matter how big of a name they are, he’s never going to let his inner fanboy get the better of him. Of course, there are always exceptions to prove the rule, and the sonorous star maintained his professionalism until he left the set.
However, once he could distance himself from the work and have a minute to himself, Freeman could scarcely believe that he was getting to spend his days side by side with an all-time great. It was for a movie no major studio even wanted to make, either, which would have been deliciously ironic had the industry’s finest exposition machine not gotten the chance to tick a major item off his bucket list.
“I met him prior and told him I’d give him my left testicle,” Freeman told the Armchair Expert podcast of his desperation to work with Jack Nicholson, which fittingly came on Rob Reiner’s The Bucket List. “He was asked if he’d do it, and he said, ‘Send me the script’. I sent him the script, and he said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it’. So there we were, me and Jack Nicholson.”
Freeman had always been a huge fan but never let that affect his performance. When he was safely ensconced in his own house, though, it was a different story. “When we were working, we were working at work. I worked,” he said. “But then I go home and I go, ‘Jesus fucking Christ. Jack Nicholson.'”
Even though they were born less than three months apart and knew a lot of the same people, Freeman still couldn’t believe he’d finally snagged the chance to share the screen with one of the best ever. He had to put his admiration to the side in order to get the job done, and he even managed to overcome his adoration of the three-time Oscar winner to end up with a new friend.
Freeman has always presented himself as somebody who never gets flustered, but he’s still human at the end of the day. He was a massive Nicholson fan shooting a movie where the majority of their scenes were together, leaving The Bucket List to live up to its title in more ways than one.
