Morgan Freeman

"The Role he was Born to Play"

Morgan Freeman is an actor known for embodying class, wisdom, and elegance into his characters, from Hoke in Driving Miss Daisy to Sergeant Major Rowlins in Glory to Red in The Shawshank Redemption to his Oscar-winning role as Eddie Dupris in Million Dollar Baby to even narrating the French documentary March Of The Penguins.

Now the 72 year-old actor will embark on the role of a lifetime, as South African apartheid activist turned president Nelson Mandela in the new Clint Eastwood film Invictus. Freeman shared for us why Eastwood made filling the big shoes of Nelson Mandela a labor of love.

"It might have become more than that were I playing or working with someone other than Clint Eastwood. He is so enabling. He is so out of your way as an actor and he likes to watch actors play. I don't think I do anything other than that when I'm working. I'm just playing. Work is something else. Work is maybe what you do.

We asked Morgan if he had known anything about the sport of rugby, which originated in Britain, and in which the film is centered on in South African rugby team captain Francois Pinaar.

"Nothing," Freeman replies, "I know American football. I know just a little bit about soccer. I know baseball. I know basketball. I know golf. But rugby is foreign language."

Freeman shared with us how he prepared for the role and what he wanted to bring to Mandela in this film.

"When he said that he would prefer that I be the one to play him in 1990 or whenever that was, I had to start then preparing myself to do it," he says, "So, I met him not long after that and I said to him, 'If I'm going to play you, I'm going to have to have access to you. I'm going to have to be close enough to hold your hand.' And, over the years, while we were trying to develop

Morgan Freeman

"The Role he was Born to Play"

Long Walk To Freedom, that is what happened. Whenever we were in proximity, like a city away for instance, I would know about it and I would go to him and have lunch, have dinner, or sit with him while he's waiting to go on stage for whatever, and during that time, I would sit and hold Madiba's hand."

"Now that's not for camaraderie," Morgan continues, "I find that if I hold your hand, I get your energy, it transfers, and I have a sense of how you feel. That's important to me trying to become another person. I have a lot of pressure to bring a character like that to life in any kind of real sense. The danger, of course, is always at caricature, sort of indicating what the person is like, 'I'm Superman!' The biggest challenge I had, of course, was to sound like him. Everything else is kind of easy to do "” to walk like him. He has a few tics and things that I noticed and I picked those up. I didn't have any agenda as it were in playing the role other than to bring it as close to reality as I possibly could. The agenda is incorporated in the script and all I had to do was learn my lines.

This is actor-turned-filmmaker's Clint Eastwood's third film with Morgan, who he's worked with previously on Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby. He explains to us what makes Eastwood a delight to work with.

"You don't really want to go to Clint and say, 'I'd just like to talk a little bit about the character,'" he claims, "'Why?' He expects you to know what you're doing and he's going to take two giant steps back and let you do it. I just have such deep appreciation for that part of him. And, the other part is, Matt says it's a tight ship, I think it's a well oiled machine."

"Try to imagine

Morgan Freeman

"The Role he was Born to Play"

yourself as the captain of a ship that really runs well," Freeman adds, "You don't do anything. You just get credit for the fact that it runs well. The engine room does their job, the steering does their job, the deck crew do their job. It's all done and done well. 'Well Captain, you run a very nice ship,' 'Thank you very much.' So that's what Clint says he does and it's wonderful. And everybody who works with him has this very same reaction to him, 'Can I stay with you?'

However, Freeman is quick to note that the credit for the high quality does not go to Eastwood alone.

"In a movie like this, in a project like this, actors, director, producers, we all get so much attention and so much credit, but I want you to know the young, unassuming man who actually wrote this script," Morgan proclaims, "Because no word on the page, nothing happens. Tony Peckham, that is the man who gets kudos from all of us."