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NEW YORK -- Here's how to determine just how much clout you have as a movie star: Tell a director you want to make a fundamental script-altering change to your character, then wait and see if he flinches. Or laughs. Or maybe just fires you.
As an actor, Morgan Freeman carries a pretty big stick. So when he told Unleashed producer/screenwriter Luc Besson (The Fifth Element) and director Louis Leterrier (The Transporter) just weeks before shooting was to begin that he wanted his character in the movie to be blind, there was no barking laughter, no hair-pulling and no screaming. Just some hasty rewrites.
Freeman's character, Sam, who acts as a father figure of sorts to martial arts star Jet Li's character, Danny, "is almost too good," Freeman explained in an interview at a Manhattan hotel. Having him be blind "adds a dimension to the character that makes you believe the rest of it, as far as I can see."
Unintentional pun aside, Freeman's conviction that his character should be sightless made sense to Besson, sometimes described as the Steven Spielberg of Europe in terms of both his talent and power. And so the script changes were made. Impressive, no?
Unleashed, opening in theatres Friday, tells the tale of a Glasgow mob enforcer (Bob Hoskins) who takes in a young Chinese boy (Li) after the lad's mom is murdered, then raises him as a ruthless yet almost childlike killing machine who he turns loose on delinquent debtors like an attack dog.
After becoming separated from his cruel mob clan, Danny falls in with a kindly blind piano tuner (Freeman) and his teenaged stepdaughter (Kerry Condon), and discovers what it means to feel love and acceptance. Until, of course, his not-quite-dead-yet crime boss comes a-calling.
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Having Sam be blind balanced out the character's saintliness and made him more vulnerable when his family is placed in jeopardy. And playing a blind man isn't as hard as it looks, Freeman said.
"The easiest part about playing blind is all you have to do is close your eyes," said the affable and unflappable actor. "The second part is you get an awful lot of support. Everybody on the set accepts that you're blind and you're supported as a blind person."
Freeman has obviously had some luck playing men with failing eyesight. The 67-year-old actor won his first-ever Oscar portraying an aging ex-boxer in Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, which emerged as the big winner at this year's Academy Awards.
"The truth of the matter is winning the Oscar is sort of anti-climactic, actually, for a supporting actor," Freeman said.
"Winning the Oscar for best picture, best director, best actress and best supporting actor - that was a coup. I was very pleased with the overall. But just winning the Oscar, I don't know."
Freeman has the same sense of shoulder-shrugging humility about his latest role, which happens to be in one of the biggest and most eagerly anticipated movies of 2005: Batman Begins. But that could be simply because he'd never heard of his character before reading the script.
"I'm playing a character that I didn't even know had anything to do (with Batman). You ever heard of Lucius Fox?" Actually, now that you mention it, no.
Apparently Fox was a friend and colleague of Batman alter ego Bruce Wayne's father, but was demoted by the company board after the senior Wayne was murdered. Or something.
"I didn't know about Lucius Fox from the comics," Freeman said. "I've been reading Batman since I was nine years old. Before that I was just looking at the pictures."
Freeman said Batman Begins looks very promising, even though he himself wasn't involved in any of the superhero flick's high-concept action scenes. Ditto for Unleashed, which is an odd mix of fists-a-flying kung fu and quiet, contemplative drama.
"It's two movies in one, and I had nothing to do with the other movie," Freeman said. "I was never on the set, I didn't see it, I didn't go to watch the fight scenes or anything."
So does that mean he didn't learn any moves from co-star Li?
"Have you seen the stuff he does?" Freeman laughed. "You think I wanna be crippled?"