The Tom Hanks role Morgan Freeman wished he’d played: “Any of us would have jumped at it”
Throughout their careers, Morgan Freeman and Tom Hanks have become synonymous with playing good, kind-hearted characters who audiences love. Simply put, Freeman is the sagely voice of heft, while Hanks is the dependable everyman supreme.
Having said that, both men have dabbled with crossing over to the dark side in their careers, and though it may shock you, Freeman is the one who has danced with the devil on a far more regular basis. Admittedly, despite playing villains in more than ten films, including not one but two contract killers, few of them were good movies, so they didn’t make much of an impression on his career when weighed alongside classics like The Shawshank Redemption, Se7en, or the Dark Knight Trilogy.
In truth, Freeman’s best villainous turn came in one of his first breakthrough big-screen roles: 1987’s Street Smart, in which he played a ruthless pimp. It’s the kind of unsavoury, exploitative character he’s never played again, although his ageing hitman in Nurse Betty and merciless leader of an ancient cabal of bullet-bending assassins in Wanted were pretty good efforts at embracing his dark side again.
Unfortunately, one of Freeman’s worst attempts at showing audiences he could be a despicable son of a bitch came in 2003’s Dreamcatcher, a truly batshit Stephen King adaptation. It featured three foot-long alien worms bursting out of men on the toilet, yet somehow managed to make Freeman’s insanely bushy eyebrows the weirdest aspect of its astonishingly misguided 134-minute runtime.
To his credit, he found something to like about playing Colonel Abraham Curtis, and he seemed to like, or, at least, successfully lied about liking, the movie. “He’s gotten very messianic about a mission he’s been entrusted with,” Freeman told MovieWeb about Curtis. “It’s one of these great, huge effects movies, and yet the characters are still a lot of fun. That’s good. That’s good filmmaking because you’re not depending on the effects to ‘make’ the movie.” Hey, whatever you say, Morgan.
Fascinatingly, though, despite his claims that he enjoyed starring in Dreamcatcher, the actor admitted that he was ever-so-slightly jealous of a role his old Bonfire of the Vanities co-star Hanks played only a year earlier. As of 2002, Hanks had never played a villain, so cinephiles were astonished when he was cast as mob hitman Michael Sullivan in Sam Mendes’ Depression-era gangster flick, Road to Perdition. Since that film, Hanks has added another couple of villains to his arsenal (namely in The Ladykillers and Elvis), but Sullivan was his first attempt at proving he had cinematic darkness within him.
Ultimately, the character proved to be more of an antihero than an outright villain, but the shocking image of Hanks gunning people down in cold blood was enough to shake most audiences to their core. Of course, it helped that Road to Perdition was an excellent movie that boasted Paul Newman’s last live-action screen performance, but Hanks more than held his own, convincingly removing everything audiences usually associated with him to create a hollow, haunted character.
For Freeman, Hanks’ performance as the gun-toting Sullivan was a revelation, and he’d have loved to have been able to take a crack at it himself. “He was just brilliant,” the impressed star gushed, “Any of us would have jumped at it. Anybody”. Then, with a nod of the head, he added, “When a script like that comes along, there’s no question you want to do it”.
