“Lioness” star Morgan Freeman is praising Taylor Sheridan for the “courage” he displays through his writing.
While talking with The New York Times this week, the legendary actor was effusive with his compliments for Sheridan. Not only has he created mega-hit “Yellowstone” and its ever-growing number of spinoffs, but also “Lioness,” in which Freeman plays Secretary of State Edwin Mullins.
“His writing has to do more with the human experience, what people are actually going through, emotionally, in a lot of cases,” he shared. “You saw that a lot in ‘Yellowstone,’ and you actually see it a lot in any of his writings.”
Freeman continued: “And here, in ‘Lioness,’ in Joe’s [Zoe Saldaña’s character] case, for instance, he is dealing with a woman whose life is on the line very often. She has kids and a husband. She makes decisions and she has to consider these. It takes courage to write about stuff like that, and Taylor seems to have an awful lot of it.”
Sheridan himself has always been one to speak up about the writing process as he juggles a number of shows. Back in June, he appeared on “The Bill Simmons Podcast” and lamented at how difficult writing a show can be these days when facing a squad of executives armed with notes. He argued that the number of changes requested by people who aren’t creative has stifled productions and extended timelines due to “endless rewrites.”
“It didn’t used to be this way when Steve McQueen was a movie star at Paramount and Bobby Evans ran the studio because writers were turned loose, directors were turned completely loose,” Sheridan said. “There weren’t endless rewrites. There weren’t meetings with executives about tone and mood and all this nonsense. You didn’t have a lot of people. By the way, the studio executives and the network executives … these are marketing executives for the most part. Or maybe they studied law or whatever. Then they came and they got a job in the mailroom at CAA or WME and hated that s–t.”
“So, then they ended up as an intern at some network. Then through attrition, they find themselves the head of development. Well, what do you know about developing story? You know nothing. So they get terrified, panicked that the audience won’t get it because they actually have no storytellers,” he added. “Our business, at this point, is truly governed by these executives because they’re the ones that are going to determine whether or not your script is going to go into production. They’re going to try and control every element of that.”
“Lioness” Season 3 airs Sundays on Paramount+.
