Morgan Freeman has some regrets about his decades-long career.
Freeman, 89, who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as Eddie “Scrap-Iron” Dupris in 2004’s Million Dollar Baby, said Denzel Washington is the actor whose career he wishes his more closely resembled.
“Denzel Washington is doing what I wanted to do,” Freeman said in a new interview with Rolling Stone. “I took the jobs that were offered, and I thought I was doing well, and I was. But not those action flicks.”
Freeman is known for roles in a slew of iconic films, including The Shawshank Redemption, Se7en, Driving Miss Daisy, Glory, and The Dark Knight trilogy.
The 1989 crime thriller Glory was the one time the two actors appeared on the big screen together. In the film, Washington plays an escaped enslaved man who joins the Union Army alongside Freeman’s character, the film’s moral compass.
Washington, 71, went on to play an action hero many times over in films like Training Day, Man on Fire, and The Equalizer films. He won Best Supporting Actor for Glory and Best Actor for Training Day in 2002.
Freeman’s career remained successful following the 1989 film, cementing him as one of the most iconic actors of his generation and earning him five Academy Award nominations. But while he said he would have liked to look back on a career like Washington’s, time wasn’t on his side.
“My career started around my age of 50—that’s when it took off. Before that, I was working different venues a lot. 20 years on the Broadway stage,” he explained. “Who I envy is Denzel.”
Still, he’s grateful for how his career turned out. “I was a child of the movies. I grew up in the movies. When I was a kid and when there was no school, I was in the movies every day. So that’s what I wanted to do,” he said.
Washington has expressed his admiration for the star over the years, calling Freeman a “great man” during a tribute speech at 2008’s Kennedy Center Honors.
“This great man that I’ve been fortunate to know and call a friend for 29 years now. He lives on the same patch of land in Mississippi that his grandparents worked, sails his own boat by himself to the Bahamas, flies his own plane by himself around the country,” Washington said. “Morgan Freeman is very much his own man.”
