Invictus: Morgan Freeman on Acting
I watched Invictus over the weekend, a story about Nelson Mandela’s inspirational leadership in uniting South Africa after apartheid. Having spent some time in Joburg and Pretoria and Cape Town, I saw some familiar landscapes in the movie. Shortly after Mandela’s book, Long Walk to Freedom, came out, he was asked who he would want to play him, if the book ever became a movie. He said, “Morgan Freeman.”
One reviewer has noted that Freeman doesn’t just impersonate Mandela, but his acting is so good that he incarnates him. In the interview, Freeman commented:
‘I told him that if I was going to play him, I was going to have to have access to him,’ the actor said. ‘That I would have to hold his hand and watch him up close and personal.’
As an actor, ‘you’re looking for the physical: how he stands, how he walks, how he talks,’ he said. ‘Nuances he has in terms of tics or movements. Things that sort of define him. The inner life has to come off the page. Whatever he’s thinking, I don’t know. You have a script, and you stick to that script, and the script is going to inform you of everything.
The article goes on to talk about the screenwriter’s challenge in depicting a revered figure, such as a Mandela:
Mr. Peckham’s main difficulty in writing a script, he found, was to do justice to such a familiar and beloved figure without tipping into idolatry.
‘It was extremely difficult, because in the period I write about he was in many respects at his most saintly — leading the country the way he did,’ Mr. Peckham said. The danger of hagiography ‘was something we all knew was an issue and that I struggled with every day while I was writing it. With the additional complication that we didn’t want to be offensive and disrespectful either. It’s easy enough to kind of show someone’s feet of clay if you’re prepared to be brutal about it, but it’s not so easy when you want to be respectful without hero-worshiping.’
