The actor Morgan Freeman admires just as much as he envies: “Perseverance, versatility and charisma”
Morgan Freeman has worked with some of the greatest actors of all time. Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, Helen Mirren – the list goes on. After six decades in the business, he knows a good actor from a movie star, and he knows which performers are lucky enough to be both.
Freeman is also one of them, though he almost certainly wouldn’t identify as such. Having started in the theatre in the 1960s, he tussled with Shakespeare long before he made his Hollywood breakthrough in 1989 with Glory and Driving Miss Daisy. He commanded so much respect in the industry from early on that David Fincher was too scared to call him up to offer him the lead in his movie Se7en, and he even earned one of the most coveted endorsements an actor could wish for when Hollywood great Sidney Poitier said with zero equivocation that Freeman was “one of the best actors in the world”.
For a star who commands so much respect from his peers, it should not be taken lightly when Freeman pays it forward and voices praise for someone else. In 2019, he did just that, telling Variety that Denzel Washington is so talented that he envies him. At the time, it had just been announced that Washington would be the recipient of an AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, an honour that has been granted to the likes of Orson Welles, Meryl Streep, and Freeman himself.
“Denzel is more than worthy of this honour,” Freeman told the outlet. “He is one of the people in movies that I admire and envy the most as he embodies the three qualities that this profession takes: perseverance, versatility and charisma.”
The actors go way back, even before they appeared together in the civil war drama Glory in 1989. Ten years before the film, Washington was a recent graduate of acting school when he landed a small part in the play Coriolanus at The New York Shakespeare Festival. Freeman was starring in the play, and Washington had a jousting scene with him. He later remembered trying to convince the older actor to elongate the fight so that Washington could have more stage time and that Freeman cut him down to size with a single, wordless stare.
Freeman may not have recognised his young co-star’s potential then and there, but he surely had a change of heart by the time they appeared together in Glory a decade later.
As for Washington, the respect is mutual. He may have turned down the opportunity to work with Freeman again when he was offered a role in Se7en, but it wasn’t because of his lack of admiration for his Coriolanus co-star. While speaking about his first encounter with the actor during the 2008 Kennedy Center Honors, Washington said that Freeman was gifted with “a god-given sense of timing” and “a perfect ear for nuance”.
While many cinema-goers would love to see the two friends and acting legends appear on-screen together again, the prospects have become less promising in recent months after Washington announced his plans to retire sometime in the next several years. Freeman, who is approaching 90, has voiced no plans to retire.
