(Credits: Far Out / Universal Pictures)
Mon 8 December 2025 16:45, UK
It’s ironic that Morgan Freeman, who’s long been championed as one of Hollywood’s kindliest sages, caught his big break in cinema by playing a vicious and reprehensible thug.
Even though he’d already been a working actor for almost a quarter of a century by then, he wasn’t given the opportunity to make a sizeable splash on the big screen until he played the ruthless pimp, Leo ‘Fast Black’ Smalls, in director Jerry Schatzberg’s 1987 crime thriller, Street Smart.
At the age of 50, Freeman notched his first Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, and he hasn’t looked back. While he’s always acknowledged the effect the character had on his career, he’s also made a conscious decision to avoid playing parts that are anywhere near as reprehensible.
That said, he’s played more than a few villains in his time, but they’ve always retained that innate Morgan Freeman-ness that made him a star in the first place. The veteran has claimed that he prefers playing bad guys, but they’re a lot thinner on the ground than the archetypal exposition-dumpers he’s usually cast as.
There are two especially egregious sorts that he didn’t care for one bit, though, and they were in a movie that he had nothing to do with. Funnily enough, his overall distaste for the film almost convinced him that he didn’t want to work with the director, but he changed his mind and signed on for Neil LaBute’s Nurse Betty, where he broke bad as a drug dealer’s hired gun.
Freeman famously thought that the filmmaker’s debut feature, In the Company of Men, “sucked deeply,” and the two central figures in the story left a particularly bad taste in his mouth. The 1997 black comedy follows Aaron Eckhart’s Chad and Matt Malloy’s Howard, and it would be an understatement to say that he wasn’t a fan.
“I mean, talk about a couple of scuzzy guys,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “Man, they were turds.” Being called a turd by Morgan Freeman would be an honour that any actor would graciously receive, which may have even been construed as faint praise, had he not made it so patently clear that he didn’t think In the Company of Men was a good movie at all.
Chad and Howard are the two colleagues at the centre of the story, who are dispatched to another branch of the corporation they work for. Illustrating Freeman’s point, the pair concoct a plan to woo the same woman at the same time, and then shatter her heart with a simultaneous breakup. To make things even more “scuzzy,” as Freeman would say, the target of their ruse also happens to be deaf.
They are indeed a couple of dickheads, but that’s the point. LaBute wanted his two leads to be as irredeemable as possible, but by the time the credits rolled, the Academy Award-winning legend couldn’t see past the fact they were a couple of turds.
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