Point of view: Making us want to be better people

Morgan Freeman talks ‘Ben-Hur’, career choices, religion

LOS ANGELES: Morgan Freeman, the velvet-voiced doyen of some of America’s best-loved movies, sometimes lets his cool crown slip.

On Monday it was a loud, burp that elicited gales of shocked laughter from a handful of journalists gathered in a Beverly Hills hotel to hear Freeman talk about his latest movie, Ben-Hur.

Since his inauspicious, uncredited debut as ‘man on street’ in Sidney Lumet’s 1964 movie The Pawnbroker, Freeman’s 79 films, one for every year, have made $4.3 billion at the box office.

That’s more than the GDP of 10 African countries and about the same as the combined receipts of the films of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. Next up is Ben-Hur, in which Freeman takes up an unkempt set of dreadlocks and the robes of a Nubian sheik.

Freeman, the apotheosis of debonair Hollywood superstardom, is often perplexed when journalists ask him why he was drawn to this movie or that character. “The bottom line is that it’s a job. I heard this story. Maybe it’s apocryphal but I don’t think it is,” the twice-divorced father-of-four said in his irresistible, pancake-syrup timbre, impish glint in his eye.



“There’s this old actor. The last night he was alive he went to bed and he wrote a note to himself: ‘I work.’ That’s really what we do, we look for work. When you’re as lucky as I am, every now and then something extraordinary comes your way.”

Jack Huston, who plays the titular Jewish prince turned chariot racer, is “goooood looking,” Freeman enthused, drawing out “good” the way one might elongate the “de” in “delicious” if eating fried chicken.

Timur Bekmambetov’s version of Ben-Hur, the iconic story of brotherly rivalry and Christian redemption, has a lot to live up to.

There have been five films of Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel, including William Wyler’s 1959 opus that won 11 Oscars and wowed audiences with its chariot races.

“There’s a lot of good stuff in this story that kind of informs us as humans … the idea of redemption, of tolerance, forgiveness, love. All of that makes us want to be better people,” he said.

Freeman has a library of religious texts at home, and has narrated several documentary series on faith.

A six-figure donor to Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, Freeman uses religious language when he talks about politics, voicing hope for a unified America even in an election year which has ignited racial tensions.

“This is America. That’s what America means, hope,” he said. “We are always going to pull through. Eventually, we are always going to realise we really are, as a people, on God’s side.”

Published in The Express Tribune, August 18^th, 2016.

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