The role Morgan Freeman refused to ever return to: “I don’t wanna be typecast”
Keep swimming or you’ll drown – that’s often the advice. If you don’t keep moving forward, you’ll stall. When it comes to the creative world, that definitely rings true. If an artist doesn’t keep evolving, they so often get stuck. They wind up spending their entire career making the same music, playing the same role, doing the same thing. Morgan Freeman wasn’t going to let that happen.
Being typecast is a blessing and a curse. In a way, it’s a compliment. It’s definitely a positive to be so good and so convincing playing a role that people want more of it. It’s proof that an actor could fully disappear inside a character, pulling off the ultimate aim of any performance. But, it becomes a downside if that becomes all the world wants from you.
It’s seen over and over. Actors get boxed in and then spend forever always playing the villain, or always playing the romantic lead, or always being the comedic relief. What was the thing they do best becomes a cage they’re stuck in as it becomes hard to break out and do something else when their ability to do one thing, and do it well, is so tried, tested and trusted.
Morgan Freeman had that after Street Smart. His performance as Fast Black was not only so powerful it earned him an Oscar nomination, but it became the thing people wanted to see more of. Freeman himself understood why, given that his performance in that movie was also his own favourite. “I went as about as far away from me as I could get in terms of acting,” he said with incredible pride in the ways he pushed himself for that role. He put his all into it, and it paid off as he explained how that role challenged him, “Everything else — you know — you pull something out of you. Not that I wasn’t pulling stuff out of me in terms of my actions with the ladies, but to me, it was more alien to who I really am.”
But that pride is exactly why he never wanted to play that character again. When he’d done it perfectly the first time, why would he return for a second round?
“I refused,” he said, talking about offers he got after that movie to play a similar role and similar types of characters. He simply wasn’t interested in a repeat as he said, “As soon as you come out with something like that, you get a lot of offers to play that same role again in other films. I didn’t wanna be [typecast].”
That’s part of what makes Freeman’s career so powerful. Across his filmography, he never does the same thing twice. He’s shown his power across the entire spectrum of cinema from intense and emotional dramas to light comedy to action to romances. He’s done it all exactly because of the fact that he won’t be stuck doing the same type of performance over and over.
It’s his artistic ethos and his own personal rule as a performer. “If I’m good at something I don’t want to do that again, I want to do something else,” he said, being utterly dedicated to evolution in a way that has only served him.
