9) Laurence Fishburne – Apocalypse Now
This entry almost went to Christian Bale, who was just twelve when he starred as Jim ‘Jamie’ Graham in Spielberg’s 1987 World War II epic Empire of the Sun and who (despite a few mixed reviews about the film overall) carried the movie admirably. But as brilliant and as young as Bale was, his isn’t a particularly interesting story. Fishburne has a far more chequered history for us to laugh – sorry – be politely surprised at.
Laurence (or ‘Larry’ as he was being credited at the time) Fishburne was 18 in 1979 when he was cast in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now as the cocky, self-assured 17 year old Tyrone ‘Mr Clean’ Miller. But even if Miller hadn’t been written with these characteristics, Fishburne would still have had to have a steady hold on his own self-confidence to keep the part…. Because for those who happen to know that Fishburne was born in 1961 – the question rises fairly quickly as to quite how he could have been 18 in 1979. The answer is that he wasn’t – he was, of course, just 14, and had lied about his age in order to secure the role. Infamously beset by trouble during filming, Apocalypse Now took three years to film, by which time Fishburne still wasn’t quite at the age he had claimed to be when he first auditioned.
Apocalypse Now is now consistently accredited with being one of the best movies ever made, and Fishburne certainly makes an impression in it, mainly for the moment in which he machine-guns a boat full of Chinese civilians while his crew are inspecting it for weapons, and for his unfortunate death following one of his crew mates popping a smoke grenade for fun and attracting enemy attention.
Although Fishburne had his fair share of less significant roles for a decade or so, it wasn’t long before his first Oscar nomination came in 1993 for his portrayal of Ike Turner in What’s Love Got To Do With It, he became the second African-American actor ever to play the title role of Othello in 1995 (there is only one other thing filmmakers could have been doing for roles requiring black-actors before that time) and was also in sci-fi classic Event Horizon. Finally, of course, he became The Matrix’s iconic and enigmatic Morpheus in 1999, a role that it is still difficult not to associate with him even these days when we see him as Perry White in Man of Steel.
But this is exactly why Laurence was chosen over Bale for this entry, and exactly why – even though we could call his first major role notable because he was so young and because he lied about his age etc. etc. – we’re not going to leave Fishburne there.
We have already seen that most actors and actresses spent a fair amount of their early careers in TV roles, and that quite a few of these they would probably quite like to forget. But Laurence has the absolute trump card. Because for almost 5 years, he played the role of Cowboy Curtis in the American children’s TV program Pee-Wee’s Funhouse. Pee-Wee Herman himself had been taken from a film Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), which had been a surprise hit at the box office, and to be fair to the TV series, continued to be a huge success in that context too (the series won 15 Emmy awards during its time, among other accolades).
Of course, we’re slightly off topic here with the fact that Pee-Wee’s Playhouse was a TV series and not a movie, but there are two reasons that it simply had to be mentioned. Firstly, is the hilarity of the contrast between Tyrone Miller (and Morpheus) and Cowboy Curtis – alongside the fact that this show did quite a lot to keep Fishburne on the circuit during those years. And secondly, it clearly gives us (yet another) reason for a remake of a third and final Matrix film – complete with plot device – in which Neo chooses to take the blue pill after all but finds that it doesn’t actually transport him back to a life of normality and ignorance, but to somewhere else entirely……
Well it’s still a better plotline than The Matrix Revolutions.