MORGAN FREEMAN
He played God i n Bruce Almighty, and now the Academy Award winner, 78, explores the mysteries of the divine as host ( and producer) of the National Geographic Channel series
The Story of God, premiering tonight.
Why do you think people believe in a higher power? If you go back far enough— let’s say to the beginning of human curiosity— we began to wonder why the top of a mountain would blow off or why all of a sudden it wouldn’t stop raining or why the earth shook. Those were unknowable, unanswerable questions. And the answer for what you don’t know is God, the great unknown.
One episode covers miracles. Like what? We interviewed Alcides Moreno, a window washer who had fallen 47 stories to the ground. He and his brother, who died, were on a scaffold when the cabling broke. The aluminum platform sailed down, like a leaf or a piece of paper. The guy broke almost every bone in his body— but lived.
What do you believe? My personal belief is in life, at least on this planet. Life everlasting, for the simple reason that life is so self- sustaining. You die, but you’re not useless. You die and your body is put to use. Everything that feeds, feeds on something that’s dead. Did you find that no matter where you went people were more or less the same regardless of what they
believed? Oh, yes, yes, yes. We came away from this project with the feeling that we’re much more the same than we are different.