Why Morgan Freeman isn’t a pilot

Morgan Freeman remembers the moment he decided to pursue acting, said Louise Gannon in the London Daily Mail. The 73-year-old actor grew up in Mississippi with the dream of becoming either an actor or a fighter pilot, and in the 1950s, he made his decision and enlisted in the Air Force. It wasn’t easy. As a young black man, he recalls, “I had to fight to be a pilot, to be twice as good, three times as sharp, and four times as focused.”

After five years in the military, he finally got a shot in the cockpit, and his goal of becoming a fighter pilot appeared to be within reach. But as he was preparing to take off on his first flight with a trainer, something unexpected happened. “I climbed into the cockpit and thought, ‘This is my dream, this is it.’ Then I looked down at my hands on the wheel and I had the sudden realization that the whole point of this machine was to kill people.” It was at that instant, Freeman says, that he figured out what his true aspiration was. “I realized I didn’t want to be actually killing people. My dreams were about war movies, not war. I wanted to act as a fighter pilot, not be one.”

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