The role Morgan Freeman grew to despise: “I could hardly stand to get up in the morning”
When aspiring young actors first try to forge a career in show business, they will likely take whatever job they can find. Major motion picture roles aren’t often handed out to inexperienced performers, so the vast majority of the industry will need to pay their dues with commercial work, voiceover gigs, independent theatre productions, and minor TV gigs.
Even luminaries like Morgan Freeman started their careers this way. In fact, it famously took Freeman nearly 15 years to land his first feature film appearance, and the better part of another 20 years before he broke through in Hollywood. However, this isn’t to say Freeman wasn’t making a living in acting before Driving Miss Daisy made him a household name. He actually first began making real money with a long-running television job in the early ’70s – but soon grew to hate the job with a passion.
In 1971, Freeman began starring as ‘Easy Reader’ in the PBS children’s show The Electric Company, which gave him his first sustained taste of life outside the theatre. The show was designed to educate children across America with its mix of sketches, puppetry, animated segments, and singing. Freeman played a supercool hipster who loved reading, and his duty was to teach the kids about literacy and grammar.
Freeman stayed on the show for five long years, which, according to his estimation, was at least three years too long. “I liked the first two,” he claimed to the New York Times in 1989. However, the longer he stayed on the show, the more he felt trapped by the drudgery of doing the same things every year. Even worse, though, was that he began to be recognised out in the world for the first time, but it was for playing a character he didn’t have any passion for.
“I walk down the street and it’s ‘Hello, Easy Reader!'” he lamented. “It’s an ego problem. I’m an actor, and I don’t want to be Easy Reader forever!”
Freeman wound up telling himself, “This is absolutely the last year I’m going to do this,” yet every year he’d come back because he was making a good living. “I felt like a prostitute,” he darkly confessed. “I was working, not that I liked the work, but I needed the money.”
This potent mix of unhappiness and guilt manifested in the actor drinking more and more, which soon became a big issue. One martini at lunch became two, then it switched to two or three Scotch whiskies. “Next thing I knew, I was going through two or three quarts of whiskey a week, which may not be a lot to people who really drink, but it was too much for me,” a horrified Freeman recalled. He finally hit rock bottom when he woke up in his apartment doorway, face down, with no idea how he’d got there. “I lay there thinking, ‘You’re lying face down, drunk, and this will never do,'” the disgusted star explained. “And so, I quit drinking.”
Once Freeman confronted his drinking problem and got it under control, he knew he had to tackle the root cause of the drinking in the first place. “I could hardly stand to get up in the morning and go to work,” he confessed, adding that he felt “trapped by greed and insecurity – the actor’s constant bane.”
Ultimately, though, Freeman didn’t quit The Electric Company. Instead, he stayed until the show was cancelled, airing its last episodes in 1977. “It just shut down,” he nodded. “I’m afraid if it hadn’t, I would never have left.” In later years, he confessed that he chastised himself for “not having the courage to just walk away,” but thankfully, the cancellation came at a fortuitous time and released him from his TV purgatory.
