The performance Morgan Freeman has regretted since 1967: “The worst role I did”
Having only started his acting career in 1964, it didn’t take Morgan Freeman very long to stumble upon the worst role of his career, and since then, it’s never wavered as his performative nadir.
That’s an awfully long time to hold a grudge, especially when his biggest issue isn’t necessarily with his own performance. Yes, the Academy Award-winning veteran conceded that the entire production was a disaster, but he did try and shift at least a little bit of the blame away from himself.
Not that he was placing it entirely on someone else, either, but he made sure to note that its unwanted status as the weakest brick in the career-long wall of excellence he’s built up since then wasn’t because he was a bad actor. Bad in the role, yes, but the circumstances weren’t ideal to begin with.
Like most jobbing thespians, a young Freeman began on the stage. He didn’t start out on Broadway, and neither did he start out off-Broadway, but somewhere else entirely. He started treading the boards off-off-Broadway, acting in church basements and cavernous warehouses, which he lovingly referred to as “dungeon theatre.”
He made it to the bigger leagues eventually, albeit at a cost. “I don’t know about low moments, but I know the worst role I did was that play on Broadway,” he told the BFI. “It was a three-character play, a would-be comedy, and I think the funniest thing about it was the one night the lead actor just completely forgot every line.”
“That play” was the 1967 original run of George Tabori’s The Niggerlovers, and based on who else was part of the three-person cast, the lead who couldn’t remember their lines was the celebrated character actor, Stacy Keach, with Viveca Lindfors rounding out the trio. “The play lasted about four days,” he recalled. “That’s the way it goes in New York.”
He didn’t go so far as to criticise his own performance, even though he’d literally just called it the worst role of his career, but he didn’t spare his colleague from shame after they’d forgotten their lines. “It’s his problem,” he said. “The audience now begins to know that it’s his problem. That begins to grow as this actor struggles to find out where he’s supposed to be. Then we just closed the curtain.”
Freeman wasn’t directly at fault, or at least that’s the way he likes to tell it, but the second-hand embarrassment was so palpable that even decades after the fact, it remained lodged firmly in his mind as his lowest point as a working actor, and that’s saying something when he’s gone on to amass well over 100 credits across theatre, film, and television in the years since.
It was one of Keach’s first roles, too, but he didn’t let it get him down. The Golden Globe winner and Tony nominee would go on to become one of the industry’s most prominent ‘that guy from that thing you’ve seen’ actors, even if he played a major role in the disastrous play that became seared into Freeman’s memory as the worst moment he’d ever experienced as a thespian.
