In a dishonest age when truth is under siege, media attention shatters into a thousand shards of glass and nothing is quite what it seems, what could be more precious than a voice of authority? Cue Morgan Freeman, an actor who has portrayed a US president, Nelson Mandela and the Almighty, and replaced Walter Cronkite on the voiceover introducing the CBS Evening News. If John Gielgud’s baritone was described as being “like a silver trumpet muffled in silk”, Freeman’s is like rich wood polished to a quiet shine.
It was less God’s gift than the product of hard work, thanks to an inspiring voice and diction instructor at his community college in Los Angeles. “If you’re going to speak, speak distinctly, hit your final consonance and do exercises to lower your voice,” says Freeman, dapper in light jacket , via video call from New York. “Most people’s voices are higher than they would be normally if they knew how to relax it. He taught that sort of thing. It was Robert Whitman: I will never forget him.”
Yet the 88-year-old’s signature voice is no longer entirely his own. Hollywood is reeling from artificial intelligence that can replicate the way actors look and sound. The late James Earl Jones consented to the use of AI to replicate his voice as Darth Vader after he stepped away from the role. Freeman has not. “I’m a little PO’d, you know,” he says. “I’m like any other actor: don’t mimic me with falseness. I don’t appreciate it and I get paid for doing stuff like that, so if you’re gonna do it without me, you’re robbing me.”
Has it already been happening? “Well, I tell you, my lawyers have been very, very busy.” They have already found cases and are pursuing them? “Many, yeah. Quite a few.”
Freeman is equally unenthusiastic about Tilly Norwood, an entirely synthetic person regarded as the first “AI actor”, who was officially unveiled in September. “Nobody likes her because she’s not real and that takes the part of a real person, so it’s not going to work out very well in the movies or in television … The union’s job is to keep actors acting, so there’s going to be that conflict.”
Freeman is here to talk about Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, the third in a trilogy of films about a group of illusionists called the Four Horsemen who use magic tricks to pull off audacious heists. He has a cameo role as magician Thaddeus Bradley, who was a foe in the first movie, an ally in the second and has now evolved into a mentor who shares a country pile (filmed at a 150-year-old mansion near Budapest) with a hall of mirrors and Harry Houdini’s straitjacket. Indeed, far from embracing AI special effects, the director Ruben Fleischer went in the opposite direction, bringing in illusionists to teach the cast authentic tricks.
Freeman has always appreciated hard-earned craft. His beginnings were humble: his father was a…
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