The only TV show Morgan Freeman and Axl Rose both starred in: “Wait, they said yes?”
It should go without saying that Morgan Freeman and Axl Rose have never travelled in the same circles, but somehow, they both ended up guest-starring in the same season of the same TV show.
In one corner, there’s the Academy Award-winning icon of the silver screen, synonymous with lending instant gravitas to anything he appears in, whether it’s a prestige drama or a mindless blockbuster, although there’s been a lot more of the latter than the former in recent years.
In the other corner, there’s the Guns N’ Roses frontman, renowned during his 1980s heyday for his hell-raising behaviour, and a musician who never showed the slightest interest in following many of his contemporaries into a potentially lucrative side gig as a recurring face in film and television.
They’ve got absolutely nothing in common, and as a lifelong fan of the blues, you wouldn’t expect Freeman to be caught headbanging at a Guns N’ Roses gig, or any other kind of hard rock, for that matter. However, only one thing could have possibly brought the unlikely combination together: Scooby-Doo, of course.
Running for two seasons between 2019 and 2021, Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? lived up to its billing by pairing the cartoon canine and his human associates with a cabal of random guest stars. Freeman appeared in the second season’s second episode, ‘The Last Inmate’, while Rose was in the 23rd instalment, ‘Dark Diner of Route 66!’.
From the sound of things, showrunner Chris Bailey was throwing names out there, and he could barely believe who agreed. “It was like, ‘Really? Morgan Freeman said yes to Scooby-Doo?'” he admitted to Rolling Stone. “What?” As you’d imagine, he felt pretty much the same way about Rose, too.
“What’s funny is you get people like Axl or Morgan Freeman, they’re so extreme in their own way that it scares Scooby into a slightly new lane for everybody,” he offered. “Scooby clearly has a formula that we embrace with the rubber masks and the never-ending backgrounds where you see the same plant over and over. I think that’s comforting to a lot of people. But having these stars makes it seem fresh.”
To be fair, they were far from the only miscellaneous names to pop up on Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? Other random alumni included Steve Buscemi, Weird Al Yankovic, Ricky Gervais, Cher, Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Batman, Sherlock Holmes, and the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, naturally.
Still, if you ever want to leave your pals completely and utterly stumped down the pub, ask them to name the one and only TV show that Morgan Freeman and Axl Rose both guested in, because it’s unlikely anyone will know it off the top of their head.
