*The cast of “Going in Style” was on hand in New York at the Whitby Hotel to talk about their film. Of seasoned ages and keen knowledge, I asked them what advice would they give their twenty-something selves. Morgan Freeman was quite candid.
“If I could see my 20-year-old self,” he said, “I would be in the military. I think I would tell myself, ‘your dreams are going to come true.’ I never had one that didn’t.”
“I was a version of what Morgan just said,” Alan Arkin allowed. “I’d say to myself, ‘calm down, everything’s going to be okay. Take it easy.’” Freeman went on to say it wasn’t easy and “sometimes when it’s almost at the very limits of your endurance, I remember once finding a $20 bill in the middle of the street on Broadway. It was like, ‘Oh, it’s going to be my lucky day.”
Friends also told Morgan to never quit but some jobs were humiliating.
“There was also just total embarrassment of driving a cab in New York and having somebody I know get in it,” Morgan admitted. “It was like, ‘You’re driving a cab?’ ‘Yeah.’ But I didn’t have to do it. I was on the very verge of going to the taxi limousine service and getting a chauffeur’s license when I got job from Paul Newman. You just got to keep going.”
“Me, what I would tell my twenty-something self would be two things Winston Churchill said,” Michael Caine offered. “I would tell him what my motto was when I was 20, that life is a bit rough, and if you’re going through hell, keep going; keep calm, carry on.”
“I remember when I was 17 years old,” Ann Margaret recalled. “I said that I was going to be married one time in my life and guess what? If we make it to May 8th, it will be 50 Years on paper, and off paper, 53.” Christopher Lloyd agreed with Margaret to some extent. “I would’ve made an effort to not have so many marriages,” Lloyd quipped.
Although the actors are all over 70, Arkin wanted it to be known that the elderly are still a major part of society and not inhuman.
“It’s a weird thing,” he commented, “you hit a certain age and all of a sudden you get talked about as if you’re not a human being. To me it’s like another version of prejudice. So all of a sudden you get talked about as if you’re another species in a way.
“I don’t feel any different than I did [when I was young]. I’m a little slower than I was when I was 17, but aside from that I’m a person. You don’t ask a 36-year-old what does it feel like to be 36. All of a sudden you hit 70, and it’s like ‘what does it feel like to be 70?’ That’s the strange part. You know and it’s this culture too. There are many cultures in the world where [it’s not this way].”
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