There's nothing self-effacing about Morgan Freeman. He stands tall in all senses of the word. His long, lanky legs seem perpetually on the point of launching into a tap dance and when we shake hands I have to step back: his arms are the longest I have ever had extended towards me, with the exception of Clint Eastwood and, like Clint Eastwood, age has not diminished his sex appeal.
When he was working on Seven with Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow called him "the sexiest man alive". He's 61 in June.
It was Eastwood who cast Freeman in The Unforgiven, the film that put Morgan Freeman firmly on the cineaste's list of screen-actors-to-be-taken-seriously/to-be-seen-whatever-they're-in. Why becomes clear within seconds of our meeting: however impressive Freeman might be physically, his sharp intelligence and acute sense of irony impress even more.
By the time he made The Unforgiven, Freeman had already gained Hollywood's seal of approval with a Best Actor Oscar nomination for Driving Miss Daisy (he lost to Daniel Day Lewis with My Left Foot). But arguably that dandy performance could have been niche casting. After all, he was born in Charleston, Mississippi 60 years ago, when segregation was a fact of life.
In fact Freeman's calling card to be taken seriously had come earlier in 1987 with Street Smart, a little-known dark drama in which he played a pimp. One of the few - perhaps the only - irredeemably bad-guy parts he has ever played and which won him his first Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. After Driving Miss Daisy came Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves in which he and Alan Rickman notoriously stole the show from Kevin Costner. In 1993 he made an ambitious directorial debut with Bopha, set in Africa, in which he took on apartheid. Then came The Shawshank Redemption, which probably features among the top 10 favourite films of anyone who has seen it. In 1995 the big time began with Seven and with stardom came the featured cameo role, most recently Amistad, Spielberg's tale of slave running.
Now comes Hard Rain, an adventure thriller starring Christian Slater and more water than you would ever want to see. For the first time since Street Smart, Freeman plays the villain, albeit one who never loses the audience's affection.
"The reason I don't play bad guys very often is that bad guys are not offered to me. There are actors who play bad guys as a regular thing but they are still hidden - J.T. Walsh comes immediately to mind; J.T. still has a mask. He can hide behind characters, he can be a good guy, questionable character, a sleazo, whatever. I can't. I'm not hidden any more. If you're out in the open, as I am now, it's difficult to get them to see you in these terms."
Hard Rain is a fun movie - dare I say a rainy-day movie - but it's a movie that belongs to the special-effects people and their stadium full of water, not the actors. When I suggest to Freeman that his very real talents are wasted in an action film, he flashes me a withering look and ignores the compliment. First he takes issue with "action". Compared with Robin Hood, he says "this was activity, not action". "Robin Hood just exhausted me. I left England with sciatica. It was extremely physical, fighting with this big old heavy Saracen sword. I had to pump up just to carry it. But Hard Rain wasn't that exhausting because we were depending on machinery. We were riding around in boats and jet skis. You have all the special effects going on to make you think things are happening that aren't."
Morgan Freeman is suspicious of praise and wary of stardom. Hollywood may be where he works but he lives in New York and his home town of Charleston. He is far from being self-deprecating, however. His self-worth glints like a suit of armour and deflects compliments as easily as it deflects criticism. "It was 1978 when I first saw myself on TV. I will remember it till the day I perish and I had gone through my entire life as a performer, as an actor. Realising myself through the reactions, through the eyes, of the audience and being pumped up higher and higher and higher. People telling me `Oh you're just marvellous, you're just wonderful, you're stupendous'. Then I do this movie and I see myself and I say `Where's marvellous? Where's wonderful? Where's stupendous?' All I see is me. It's disheartening - disillusioning for sure and it puts me in a very insecure place. So I no longer trust what people say."
Morgan Freeman had not always wanted to be an actor. Like his father and brothers before him he was destined for the military. "Going into the military as a kid was all to do with the romance of war, the romance of being a warrior. But there is no romance in war. None whatsoever. The reality of it struck me the first time I sat in the cockpit of a real airplane. And I sat there looking at all those switches and dials and I got the distinct feeling that I was sitting in the nose of a bomb. I knew I wouldn't be able to survive. And I realised then and there that I didn't want reality after all. What I really wanted was the romance of make-believe."
First came a bit more reality: the fact that he was only one and a half years into his four-year military term. ("It was three years, eight months and 10 days before I was able to get out.") Next stop was a traditional theatre training where in addition to "getting my round open tones" (enunciated in deepest, mock-thespian style), Freeman's movement teacher said he showed promise as a dancer.
"I took that to heart because it means broadening your abilities and your acceptablities and your access. So I went into dance, but dance is not something you can sort of do. It requires total immersion or nothing. So for five years I was totally immersed in dance. But it was a struggle because I never looked good at auditions where they're looking at technique. I only looked good performing when I could act like a dancer."
But the dancing served him well. In addition to a voice which can (and does) jump from a whisper to a cannon in the space of a second - not to mention a range of accents that could match Meryl Streep for accuracy - he brings to his work the quality of stillness that only someone totally in control of their body can achieve.
There are still only a handful of black actors who are accorded star status in the Hollywood firmament. Most still play "black" parts. Morgan Freeman does not. He is cast as an actor, not a black actor and when I ask what changes he has seen in the position of black actors over the last few years he's back on the defensive.
"Here's the problem with the question and my attempt to answer it. There is no comparison I can make to myself or anybody else because I have never been anything other than a black actor. I guess I do bristle when I'm asked these questions. I can't say, `as a black actor' because that suggests that I could answer from some other point of view. Of course it's better. We all have more work. We don't have just movies, we have movies and television, and television is voracious. I take that as our due, I mean yours and mine, that I should be able to play anything."
For his directorial debut on Baphos Morgan Freeman was given the D.W. Griffiths Award. "D.W. Griffiths was a great director but he did this movie called Birth Of A Nation. It was an atrocious depiction of black people - savages, all they wanted was to defile white womanhood. And I'm standing up getting the award and I say: `This is most ironic that I'm standing here being given this award.' And I explain why. And they say: `Maybe we should change the name of this award.' But I say: `No; I think you should keep the name of the award but just know that irony is not lost on me."'
Hard Rain opens on Friday