Morgan Freeman Had Doubts Over His Best Role - But Then He Got An Oscar Nomination
Frank Darabont's 1994 prison drama "The Shawshank Redemption" wasn't a big hit when it was released in theaters, earning only $16 million on a $25 million budget. Good reviews didn't help, although the film garnered a lot of attention when it was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor (for Morgan Freeman), but it lost in every category. That was the year of "Pulp Fiction" and "Forrest Gump," so a film like "Shawshank" was the outlier. Thanks to its nominations, however, the film was re-released in 1995, bolstering its box office. "Shawshank" also became one of the most-rented VHS cassettes of its day, eventually turning it into a well-regarded classic in its own right. By the late 1990s, it began appearing on lists of the best films of all time. To this day, "The Shawshank Redemption" sits at the very top of IMDb's top 250, right above "The Godfather" and "The Dark Knight."
"The Shawshank Redemption" was based on the 1982 Stephen King novella "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," one of the four stories collected in his "Different Seasons" anthology. It was about a weasely character named Andy Dufresne after he is sent to Maine's (fictional) Shawshank Prison for a murder he claims he didn't commit. The year is 1947. The story was narrated by another prisoner, Ellis "Red" Redding, a red-headed Irishman, also serving a life sentence for murder. Life in Shawshank is horrible, but Andy retains hope and dreams of escaping. Red describes in detail how Andy's presence in Shawshank was ultimately a boon for the other prisoners.
In 2019, Yahoo! News talked to Morgan Freeman about his Oscar-nominated role, and he revealed that he had some reservations about playing Red, as he felt he couldn't play an Irishman.
'Maybe it's because I'm Irish'
Of course, Red's Irishness is downplayed in the final film. Andy, played by Tim Robbins, asks his fellow inmate why people call him "Red," not knowing that his last name is Redding. Red smirks and sarcastically replies "Maybe it's because I'm Irish." Freeman, it's worth noting, does not affect an Irish accent for "The Shawshank Redemption," speaking in his usual godlike, velvet-smooth patios.
Freeman recalled reading Darabont's script for "The Shawshank Redemption" and loving it. He also wanted to read the original novella for context and was horrified to learn that he was going to be playing an Irish character.
"[S]omeone sent me the novella. And I read the first page and Red was this Irishman. So I closed the book. I never read another line. I was like, 'I can't play an Irishman!' [...] I didn't play an Irishman."
Indeed, it was Darabont didn't seem to much care how Red was depicted in King's novella, and solicited Freeman at the behest of producer Liz Glotzer. The "Maybe it's because I'm Irish" line was not just a sarcastic joke, but a little wink to the Irishness of the literary Red. In a 1994 interview with EW, Freeman also admitted that he didn't do any research for the role, and didn't visit any prisons to get insight into the minds of incarcerated people. Acting the part of someone who's incarcerated doesn't require any specific knowledge of incarceration," Freeman said. "Because men don't change. Once you're in that situation, you just toe whatever line you have to toe."
Fun trivia: the photos of young Red seen in the character's prisoner file are actually of Alfonso Freeman, Morgan's son.