The real reason Morgan Freeman hates ‘The Shawshank Redemption’: “Let’s stop talking about that”
Starring in one of the most beloved movies ever made is a badge of honour that very few actors get the chance to wear, but that hasn’t prevented Morgan Freeman from getting a little prickly at just how often he’s been asked about The Shawshank Redemption.
The actor has become so synonymous with the picture that he has lost his cool when being consistently asked about the movie. The performer has a huge number of credits on his resume and to be so constantly asked about one of them in particular has left Freeman feeling particularly aggrieved. It’s left him a little sour on the subject.
Of course, that comes with the territory when you’re the silken-voiced narrator of an all-time great that’s retained its appeal through countless generations, and it even opened the door to a lucrative side hustle for Freeman. He’d never narrated a movie before Frank Darabont’s prison drama, and now he’s one of the most popular and in-demand voiceover artists of the last three decades.
Part of Freeman’s reticence to bow at the altar of The Shawshank Redemption comes from his experiences on set, which included refusing to shoot the original ending. As it turns out, though, that was just one of many disagreements he had with Darabont on a much more fractured production than the result would suggest.
Darabont had famously gained control of the movie after Stephen King sold the rights to the script for $1. It would be the start of a fairy tale story, which would end in The Shawshank Redemption becoming one of the most beloved movies of all time. But while on the screen everything was shimmering with gold, on set, things were a little more steely.
But why does Morgan Freeman hate The Shawshank Redemption?
In a retrospective for Vanity Fair, the Academy Award winner came right out and confirmed that the director was the source of his frustrations: “Most of the time, the tension was between the cast and director,” he admitted. “I remember having a bad moment with the director, had a few of those.”
Being asked to do countless takes wasn’t for Freeman, either, as he explained: “I don’t want to be chewing the scenery. Acting itself isn’t difficult. But having to do something again and again for no discernible reason tends to be a bit debilitating to the energy.” In fact, his difficulties with Darabont proved such a point of contention that the star has grown weary of talking about Shawshank at all.
Voicing his indignation at having to dredge up the Stephen King adaptation for the umpteenth time, Freeman would once again allude to “extreme moments of tension on the set”, which he put down to “personality stuff between different groups”. In the end, he simply abandoned the line of enquiry together, saying, “let’s stop talking about that one” before changing the subject.
He doesn’t even care for the title, telling Seth Meyers at one stage that he thought it was “terrible” and partially blaming it for the film’s underperformance at the box office: “Nobody could say, Shawshank Redemption. What sells anything is word of mouth,” he exclaimed. “Now, your friends say, ‘Ah, man, I saw this movie, the…what was it? Shank, Sham, Shim? Something like that. Anyways, terrific.’ Well, that doesn’t sell you.”
An unwieldy title it may have, a box office bomb it may be, and a distaste for it Freeman may carry to this day, but it can’t be argued that The Shawshank Redemption is an indisputable classic of modern cinema. It might also prove that while art can come from almost any source, perhaps the tension and frustration that bubble around on set was the magic ingredient to make it pop.
