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Wed 29 April 2026 17:15, UK
Few actors have been as open and transparent about their career motivations as Morgan Freeman, who’s never shied away from the fact that his number one goal in Hollywood is to get that bag.
And get that bag he has, with the Academy Award winner having spent the last three decades commanding a sizeable paycheque for virtually every movie he’s appeared in, which makes up for the first three decades of his career, when he could never seem to permanently wedge his foot in the door.
It feels like Freeman has been around forever, and it feels like he’s been old forever, but he didn’t become a known quantity in cinema until he was 50, when 1987’s Street Smart gave him both his big-screen breakthrough role and his first Oscar nomination. Since then, though, he hasn’t looked back.
If anybody asks the sonorous star what compelled him to sign on for his latest production, nine times out of ten, the answer will be the simplest and most obvious: money. However, theatre doesn’t pay anywhere near as much as the movies, which goes a long way to explaining his lengthy sabbatical from the stage.
In his defence, Freeman has always been honest about his preference for being on set rather than treading the boards, and after finishing up a month-long run of The Taming of the Shrew in New York in 1990, it would be another 18 years before the industry’s marquee exposition machine dipped his toes back into those waters.
When he did, he starred opposite Frances McDormand in the Broadway revival of Clifford Odets’ The Country Girl, and it didn’t take him too long to remember why he’d avoided the art form for so long. “When I went back there,” he reflected. “There were times I said to myself, ‘Why am I doing this?’”
“One night, I forgot all my lines and started babbling,” Freeman elaborated. “Fortunately, the scene was one in which I’m supposed to babble. I started telling Frances, in the scene, ‘I’m lost, and I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing’. I’m saying this on stage! But afterwards, I thought, ‘Who needs that?’”
It was a friendly reminder that he’d gotten rusty in his absence, and it made him long to be back in his comfort zone. “On a movie, they’d just say ‘cut’ and we’d do it again,” he added, but that didn’t deter him from what remains his final hurrah on the stage. Despite his misgivings, Freeman played a major role in the original 2011 production of Dustin Lance Black’s 8, but that was the last time he was on stage.
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