Morgan Freeman aged past the point where he felt the need to be especially precious about his job at least a decade ago, having settled comfortably into the sort of elder statesman role where people will not only not give you shit for saying things like “I just basically play myself in everything these days”—as Freeman essentially admitted in an interview back in 2023—but will actively find the honesty kind of charming.
Take, for instance, an interview the 89-year-old Freeman gave to The New York Times this week, timed to the third season of his Paramount+ series Lioness. Freeman gives many of the expected answers you’d usually see in an interview like this—praising series creator Taylor Sheridan, downplaying the power of his famous voice, talking about his love of blues music, etc. —but he also gets pretty damn candid when asked about what draws him to any particular script. “If somebody offers you a job, it’s very nice if they’re offering you also an exciting script,” Freeman acknowledged. “But in reality, two or three things come into play. What are they going to pay you? If they’re going to pay you enough, then you overlook some of the glitches in the script that happen to be there.”
Freeman didn’t name any specific films where he felt happy stomaching a few “glitches” if the money still spent, but we’re going to go ahead and assume that you, the reader, had a couple of names immediately pop into your head. (You put 150-plus credits down on the ol’ IMDB, and at least a few of them are going to be a ____ Has Fallen flick.) That being said, the actor also acknowledged that, as often as not, being Morgan Freeman also carries the perk of getting anything really “glitchy” dealt with before he has to actually say the lines: “Sometimes,” Freeman notes, “You can mention things that are in the script that don’t quite work out for you and by and large, that gets worked out.”
Lioness is currently airing its third season on Monday nights on Paramount+.