The one role Morgan Freeman compared to “prostitution”
Good things come to those who wait, as Morgan Freeman discovered when he finally landed his big screen breakthrough in a movie that hit cinemas in March 1987, just three months before he turned 50 years old.
Even though he had a long list of film, television, and theatre credits dating back to the early 1960s, Freeman didn’t manage to gain a sustained foothold in cinema until Street Smart, which earned him his first Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’.
Ironically, it came by doing the exact opposite of what would eventually become his stock-in-trade, with the actor never again playing a character anything like cruel, callous, and violent pimp Leo ‘Fast Black’ Smalls. That was all by design, though, and it wasn’t long before he was the industry’s favourite wizened sage.
It was far from being a rapid rise to the top, then, but Freeman did at least have a steady job and regular source of income six seasons and close to 800 episodes after serving as a key cast member on children’s variety series The Electric Company between 1971 and 1977.
During his tenure on the show, Freeman played a range of characters from the counterculture-inspired Easy Reader to disc jockey Mel Mounds via Vincent the Vegetable Vampire, a member of the bloodsucking undead who’d opted for a strict life of vegetarianism to placate him instead of plasma.
Not that it was an experience he enjoyed from beginning to end, however, with Freeman comparing his ongoing contributions to selling himself. “I enjoyed the first two years, thinking that I’d move on after that,” he said to Alex Simon. “But it became basic prostitution, I guess.”
Describing The Electric Company as “a favoured nations kind of thing,” Freeman was critical of his own inability to declare that enough was enough. “Kept doing that every year, and kept getting angrier and angrier at myself for not having the courage to walk away,” he continued. “Then they cancelled the show in 1976, and what a let-down! No more job.”
We’ve all been there, haven’t we? Desperately suggesting that a change is needed, but unable to make the change on your own. Freeman is just a human, despite the cinematic iconography that surrounds him, and he, too, was captivated by the comfort of a steady-paying job. But when given the chance to seek pastures anew, he took it.
The positive was that he didn’t end up being characterised as a kids’ TV guy forever, which he acknowledged could have been the case had The Electric Company not bitten the bullet. “At the same time, I was happy. Otherwise, I would’ve been Fred Rogers! I would’ve been Captain Kangaroo!,” which conjures a truly bizarre mental image. “You ever see Sesame Street? There’s friends of mine who’ve been on that show nearly 30 years.”
Finding himself torn between leaving behind a guaranteed paycheque in favour of stretching his wings as an actor clearly left Freeman disenfranchised with his work on The Electric Company the longer he stuck around, but the decision was ultimately taken out of his hands when the plug was pulled by those above his station.
With that choice made for him, Freeman would go on to make a run of good choices, which would lead him into stage roles and back on screen, but this time, he wasn’t in a children’s TV show but finding himself a place at Hollywood’s highest table. Not many people enjoy redundancies, but Freeman certainly made the best use of his.
