Morgan Freeman doesn’t shout. He doesn’t rant. And he definitely doesn’t ask permission to swear on television.
That’s why what happened Thursday night felt so jarring.
Sitting across from Lawrence O’Donnell on MS NOW’s The Last Word, the 88-year-old actor — the voice that has narrated penguins, presidents, and the literal Almighty — paused mid-thought and asked a question nobody in that room was expecting.
“Can I use any profanity?”
O’Donnell told him he could say whatever he wanted. Freeman didn’t hesitate.
“We have somebody sitting in the White House who’s leading us down a sh*thole,” he said. “I can’t personally understand how a convicted felon — convicted — 34 felonious… is that a word? Counts of wrongdoing gets to be president. How do you do that?”
He wasn’t reading a teleprompter. He was working through it in real time, searching for the right word mid-sentence — “felonious… is that a word?” — and that rawness made it land harder than any rehearsed monologue could.
When the Calmest Man in Hollywood Stops Sounding Calm
Celebrities criticize Donald Trump all the time. Robert De Niro does it so often it barely qualifies as news — he was on the same network days earlier and the response was a collective shrug.
Freeman is different, and everyone knows it. For decades, he’s occupied a space in American culture that almost no one else has — steady, dignified, deliberately above the noise. He played the president who held the country together in Deep Impact. He played God in Bruce Almighty. His voice has become shorthand for reassurance. If this country had an official narrator, it would sound like him.
Which is exactly why the profanity mattered. It wasn’t theatrical. It wasn’t fiery. It sounded like a man who had simply run out of softer language.
The Next Morning, He Was Narrating a Baby Monkey
The whiplash was almost absurd.
Less than 12 hours after the MS NOW appearance, Freeman was on The View promoting the same project — The Gray House, his new Amazon Prime Civil War drama co-produced with Kevin Costner. The mood couldn’t have been more different. Sara Haines asked him to narrate a clip of Punch, the baby monkey from Japan who’s gone viral for getting bullied in his enclosure. Freeman obliged — that voice, that gravitas, all deployed for a monkey.
The night before, he’d compared the direction of the country to Germany in 1935.
“I’m constantly reminded of Germany in 1935,” he told O’Donnell. “The brownshirts, those people marching through Berlin, rounding up people, putting them in boxcars and sending them off. Now, this administration wants to build large detention centers.”
You don’t have to agree with the comparison to feel the weight of who’s making it. This is a man 88 years into a life that started under Jim Crow. He built a career in an industry that once treated the idea of a Black president as science fiction. When Morgan Freeman invokes 1935, it doesn’t land like a cable news talking point. It lands like testimony from someone who’s been paying attention for a very long time.
The Fake Endorsement That Makes This Even Sharper
There’s a layer to this story that hasn’t shown up in a single headline.
In 2024, viral posts flooded social media claiming Freeman had endorsed Trump’s presidential campaign. Shared hundreds of thousands of times across X and Facebook. None of it was true. Freeman’s team had to go through Reuters to formally deny it — because the actual Morgan Freeman had appeared in a White House video endorsing Joe Biden alongside other actors who’d played fictional presidents.
Image credit: @morganfreeman/Instagram
For months, the internet used his name to prop up a narrative he never agreed to. On Thursday night, Freeman used his actual voice to tear it apart.
“Absolutely the Worst”
The most striking part of the interview wasn’t the profanity. It wasn’t the Nazi reference. It was the quiet agreement.
When O’Donnell suggested that many young Americans feel like they’re living through the worst political moment of their lives, Freeman didn’t push back. He didn’t qualify it or try to offer perspective. He just said, “Absolutely. Absolutely the worst.”
Then he gave the only advice he had.
“If you are at all aware of where we’re headed, and if you don’t agree with it, there is one sure way to change the direction of our country: vote.”
For decades, Morgan Freeman has been the voice that narrates America’s story — in documentaries, in disaster films, in comedies, in history lessons.
On Thursday night, he sounded less like a narrator and more like a man who doesn’t like where the story is going.