Morgan Freeman is The Boss

In Theaters April 7

Morgan Freeman is one of the most respected actors in Hollywood. He finally won his first Oscar last year for Million Dollar Baby, but he'd been nominated for many well remembered films. Even his voice gets rave reviews in the films he narrates. In Lucky Number Slevin, he plays a crime boss who pulls the title character (Josh Hartnett) into a murder plot set in motion by one of his hit men (Bruce Willis).

It only occupies a few scenes in the film but the role was a joy to Freeman. "Playing is no challenge," he said. "Every time that you get a role you're just going to go play with other people in the sandbox and so there is no challenge, real challenge. The challenge, the major challenge is getting the work, finding the sandbox. I like playing. Just give me something interesting to play and I'm very happy."

What Freeman saw in Lucky Number Slevin was several fun scenes to play with fellow actors, including a confrontation with an opposing boss played by Sir Ben Kingsley. "I was kind of looking forward to the moment between The Boss and the Rabbi. That to me had a lot of potential for going flat. Not really because Ben, Sir Ben, he's always a lift. He's always interesting to watch and so you just try and remember your lines. It was one of the reasons to take a role like this. You get to work that closely with Ben Kingsley. It's like, 'Yeah. I'll do it. I don't care what it is.'"

With such an eclectic cast, most of them revolving around Freeman's character, the playful actor got to enjoy many entertaining set dynamics. "On set we have a great time. Bruce is a jolly fellow and enjoys working. You can tell that he's just happy to be there and I'm the same way. We've been in the same movie before. We didn't work together. You would say, 'I'd really like to work with that one' and he was one of them. And I'm one of his. We have the same sort of approach to work. Turn it on. Turn it off. And be sure to give the director and the DP the hardest time possible. And of course Paul McGuigan is a Scott with a thick Scottish Brogue when he talks. So he's just too easy to ride. He would say something and we'd go, 'What did you say?'"

Like all crime films in the new millennium, Lucky Number Slevin deals with several converging plot lines, often going back and forth in time and changing the audience's perception of events. Freeman grudgingly accepted the comparisons to films like Pulp Fiction and The Usual Suspects.

"I agree in that it's sort of a thinking piece. You walk away from The Usual Suspects and it was a thinking piece. They go back and they show you how this all unfolded right there in the office and The Usual Suspects was this blend of all of these different things happening and you see it in jump cuts, but it's explanatory. So I think that this was like that."

There seems to be no shortage of work for Freeman as he continues to appear in starring and supporting roles left and right. But for him, it's still a daily grind. "The operative word there is seems because all of us always have a lot of projects in the works. We've all got a lot of things ahead of us, but it's like holding sand in your hand when you've got projects in this business because they just don't happen. 'I thought that we were going to be doing so and so in June.' Well, they didn't get the money or the script is not ready or the producer or the studio changed heads. There's all kind of stuff shifts and it's all constantly in flux. Hopefully you've always got a lot of projects ahead of you. Hopefully one or two of them will pan out."

Finally becoming an official Oscar winner hardly impacted his career, because his body of work already spoke for itself. "You know, at a certain point these things don't impact you. You just keep snaking along. They sort of fall out of the sky. It took a little weight off because a lot of people are going around saying, 'You won the Academy Award for blah blah.' 'No. I didn't.' 'You didn't?' 'Well, you should have.' That's a done deal now. Yeah, I've got one."

Freeman will next reprise his role of God in the sequel Evan Almighty and costar with Paz Vega in the drama 10 Items or Less. With seemingly nothing left to prove, Freeman is actually thinking of stepping behind the scenes. "There's a lot of producing I want to do, projects that I've got stacked up that are in my office that I want to get done. And I'm starting slowly to think about the segue because sooner or later, maybe sooner than later, the phone is going to stop ringing and people are going to start saying, 'Get me a Morgan Freeman type.'"

And it's fine with Freeman if somebody fills his shoes. "When I was coming along, when I was struggling up to get here it would just piss me off to think that people thought that only one actor could fill a role. You're doing such a disservice to whole other stack of good people standing there saying, 'Me. I'll fill it.' There are tons of people who can step right in there just like they own it, and they did own it. All of the time."

Lucky Number Slevin, starring the irreplaceable Morgan Freeman, opens April 7.