“I gotta back away”: the role Morgan Freeman will always regret not getting
If there’s a voice in your head when you think about going to the movies, then there’s a good chance Morgan Freeman provides those dulcet tones. So smooth and naturally lilted is his speaking voice that he could have easily retired simply providing the narration for countless movies, documentaries and commercials. When combining this natural magnetism with a supremely dedicated work ethic and salad days spent treading the theatre boards, it would appear that Freeman’s position as a gifted Hollywood star was almost impossible to avoid.
Working with esteemed actors and directors and providing countless golden moments of cinematic bliss, Freeman’s career is a storied one. He has the awards to go with it, too, picking up a Golden Globe for ‘Best Actor’ for his role in Driving Miss Daisy in 1990 only to gain the big shiny prize of an Academy Award in 2005 for his supporting role in Million Dollar Baby. There are a few moments Freeman would readily admit that steered him in the wrong direction. However, one movie will always stand out for the actor as an opportunity missed.
Miloš Forman is a name synonymous with contemporary cinema. His 1972 movie Taking Off would give him just enough impetus to make perhaps his defining movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, starring Jack Nicholson in 1976. With many notable awards and a heap of critical praise, the film would catapult the director’s career and allow him to select his opportunities and who he grasped those chances with. In 1981, those choices would leave Morgan Freeman ruing a role he would never get to fulfil.
Ragtime may not be the first movie you think of when looking at Forman’s career. Starring James Cagney, the crime drama based on the 1975 historical novel of the same name was a relative flop at the box office. The story is rich with both criminal and societal issues and presents an African-American pianist, Coalhouse Walker, as perhaps its ultimate hero. For Freeman, owing to his love of music, this was a role he couldn’t help but be entranced by and put himself forward to be considered for the job.
When speaking with the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, Freeman opened up about the missed chance. “The most frustrating moment of my career?” he ponders when faced with the universal question and confirms “there have been a lot of frustrating moments”. However, he settled on Ragtime and his inability to snag the role of Coalhouse Walker as the one that stuck out. “I interviewed for a Miloš Forman for Ragtime. I read the book, and when I read the book—’Coalhouse Walker, that’s me!’ I got that going away.”
For Freeman, the timing couldn’t have been better. The actor was starting to make his name in theatre, and the chance to fuse both his love of the piano and acting seemed too good an opportunity to miss: “I had just gotten all kinds of accolades for Broadway play that I had done. I was the talk of the town,” he explained, “Surely, you’ve heard of me? Haven’t you?”
However, it would appear that Forman wasn’t as caught up with Broadway as Freeman had hoped and instead of picking the would-be Academy Award winner, he opted to select Howard Rollins for the role of Coalhouse Walker. Rollins is particularly pertinent in the role, a potency only added to in later years as Rollins suffered from addiction issues and legal disputes before losing his life to AIDS in 1996.
“So, I didn’t get the job,” reflected Freeman. However, one thing Freeman has never possessed is a sense of crippling self-importance. Rather than be struck down in pain by the rejection, he used it as a lesson. He may have been the hottest new actor on Broadway, but he still had a long way to go to infiltrate cinema: “It is one of those moments in your life when you realise that, ‘OK, humility is still here with me, I gotta back away’.”
Several years later, while still treading the boards on Broadway, Freeman would get the role of his life, starring in the theatre production of Driving Miss Daisy. It would make him a shoo-in for the film role and deliver his first landmark performance.