Morgan Freeman was surprised that his dreadlocks kept hitting him in the face. Freeman, who’s seventy-nine, has been acting since he was in grade school, and in the course of his long career has played everything from a chauffeur, a pimp, and God (twice) to the voice of history, narrating Hillary Clinton’s introduction film at the D.N.C. None of these roles have involved more elaborate costumes—or, at least, more elaborate hair—than that of Ilderim, a rich Nubian, circa 30 A.D. Ilderim’s dreads reach practically to his elbows. Freeman shook them to show how they dance around in a breeze.
It was lunchtime, and Freeman was sitting in his trailer at Cinecittà, the storied studio on the edge of Rome, taking a break from filming the latest version of “Ben-Hur,” which opens this month. The trailer’s TV was tuned to RAI 1, Italy’s most popular station, even though Freeman doesn’t speak Italian. “It’s all we can get,” he said, shrugging. In addition to the wig, he was wearing a long flowing robe, a wide leather belt, and felt shoes with pointed toes. He had just taken off another, more ornate robe, covered in embroidery, which was draped over a hanger. Freeman said that part of the appeal of playing Ilderim had been the extravagant getups.
“The period costumes, all of that—it’s sort of a come-on,” he said.
The “Ben-Hur” franchise is, by now, pushing a hundred and forty. It began with a wildly successful book, Lew Wallace’s “Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ,” published in 1880. Next came a stage adaptation, which ran on Broadway and used real horses trotting on treadmills to stage the chariot scene. (When Wallace saw the display, he is supposed to have exclaimed, “My God! Did I set all of this in motion?”)
The play was followed by two silent-film “Ben-Hur”s, an animated-movie “Ben-Hur,” a Ben-Hur TV miniseries, and, most famous of all, William Wyler’s three-hour-and-thirty-seven-minute wide-screen epic—one of the most over-the-top movies ever produced. Wyler employed a hundred costume-makers and some fifteen thousand extras. The chariot scene alone took three months to film, and so gruelling was the shooting schedule that a doctor was hired to administer Vitamin B injections. (Some suspected that the syringes actually contained amphetamines.)
In Wyler’s “Ben-Hur,” Sheik Ilderim was a secondary character, and an essentially comic one. He was played by Hugh Griffith, a Welshman who became Middle Eastern under several layers of burned cork. Sheik Ilderim rolled his eyes, belched loudly, and joked about his many wives. Charlton Heston, playing Judah Ben-Hur, towered over his Arab sidekick. (For his cheerfully hammy performance, Griffith received an Academy Award.)
In the 2016 version, Ilderim has been reconceived. Gone are the eructations and the casual racism. Ilderim now seems to be the biggest figure in the movie—Freeman towers over Jack Huston, the British actor playing Ben-Hur.
“There’s no humor in him at all,” Freeman said. “This character has quite a bit of power in the story. And I like playing power. It’s something about my own personal ego.”
Freeman added, “I have my own chariots and horses. I gamble on them and I make a lot of money, because the Romans are so idiotic. One line I have, I say, ‘Was there ever a kind more obsessed with the obscene?’ Nice line.”
Since the beginning, “Ben-Hur” has claimed to strive for a higher moral purpose. President James Garfield, after finishing the novel, wrote to Wallace, “With this beautiful and reverent book you have lightened the burden of my daily life.” (Shortly thereafter, he appointed Wallace ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.) But, of course, distracting spectacle has always been crucial to the story’s appeal: in “Ben-Hur,” the chariot race is more memorable than the Crucifixion. This time around, something like a full-scale Roman circus was constructed for the race, ten miles south of the ruins of the Circus Maximus.
Though the filming of the chariot race hadn’t yet begun, the lot at Cinecittà was filled with horses, which had been trucked in from all over Europe. Freeman had spent the morning with one that had refused to play its part. After lunch, the plan was to try again. “We will go back and go through the entire scene, and hope that the horse will coöperate,” he said. An assistant stuck his head in the trailer to say that it was time for another take. Someone grabbed the heavy embroidered robe, and Freeman made his way down the steps, his dreadlocks bobbing. ♦
