The only role Morgan Freeman took home with him: “I was out of control”
The next time you hear an actor baring their soul about how their latest role was so harrowing and emotionally taxing that they found it affecting their home lives, just picture Morgan Freeman rolling his eyes.
Despite being one of the most beloved actors from the last four decades of Hollywood history, Freeman is about as far away from a luvvie as you can get. He comes from the school of thought that acting is a craft, not an art form, and that there’s no need to torture yourself emotionally and physically to create the perfect performance. In his case, it’s simple: you pretend you are your character while the cameras are rolling, but as soon as they stop, you go back to being yourself.
“You can never turn yourself into the character,” Freeman told the Dallas Observer in 2000, flying in the face of everything Daniel Day-Lewis has ever believed. “But in my mind, I turn myself into the character.”
By sticking to this very simple philosophy, Freeman has always been able to separate reality from fiction, and this helps him avoid any potential shitstorms that could come from bringing a character home with him. For example, in Se7en, he played Detective William Somerset, a veteran investigator who has spent an entire career seeing every single fucking depraved thing a human being could do to another. It has left him disillusioned with his goddamn job, pissed off at humanity, and positive that no one should ever bring a child into such a violent, callous universe.
For an actor who likes embracing the ‘method’, this role might have been a tricky proposition. Somerset, for much of the movie, seems clinically depressed, and inhabiting that kind of character day after day could seriously affect the mental state of a method actor. Not Freeman, though. “I knew that, as distasteful as the murders were in Se7en, when the director said ‘Cut,’ the victims would get up, get cleaned up, and go about the rest of their day,” he shrugged to the Express in 2010.
Sounds simple, right? Even when dealing with material that could upset the most well-balanced person, Freeman’s thesis of “It’s not real” has served him well throughout a long, varied career. He calls the idea of an actor losing themselves in a role “the Othello Syndrome”, but insists his fastidious compartmentalisation of real-life and fiction is unshakeable. Well, aside from one time he accidentally let a role follow him home, but that is the exception that proves the rule. Why? Because he instantly nipped it in the bud.
The story behind this brief lapse in Freeman’s process was never fully explained, with the star simply admitting he took a character home for “a short moment when I realised when I was out of control.” He revealed that the character in question was Hoke Colburn, the kindly chauffeur he played in Driving Miss Daisy, which launched him to late-in-life stardom in 1989. The characteristics, emotions, or actions he felt he carried over to his home remain a secret, but he swore he would never fucking do that shit again.
It’s hard to say exactly what Freeman meant by saying he took Colburn home, or how it resulted in him being “out of control.” Hazarding a guess, though, perhaps he internalised some of the intense criticism he took from the Black community for playing Colburn, a subservient character who many slapped with the ‘Uncle Tom’ label. These critics accused the film of preaching an unrealistic, hackneyed version of race relations in the American South, with a huge slice of the ‘white saviour’ trope thrown in for good measure.
Did Freeman find himself thinking like Colburn, who was upset with this vitriol? Potentially, although it’s impossible to say for certain.
