Source: Entertainment Weekly

Laurence Fishburne has plenty of memories from his time shooting the iconic franchise The Matrix — and some of them still live in his bones.

During a recent appearance at this year’s Marrakech Film Festival, the 64-year-old star looked back on the defining roles of his career, including how he got into character to play the sci-fi icon Morpheus, which demanded a lot more physical training than he’d expected.

“We were essentially the first Western actors to work in the Hong Kong style, and so [martial arts choreographer] Yuen Woo-ping was very concerned that we weren’t going to be able to [pull it off],” Fishburne said of the stars of directors Lilly and Lana Wachowski’s groundbreaking 1999 film, who also included Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss, per Variety.

Fisburne remembered Woo-ping training them “really hard” to get them to the point that they were like “professional athletes.”

“It was in the middle of that training I realized why they pay professional athletes so much money — because professional athletes are always in pain,” he quipped at the fest. “Not in pain sometimes, like when you go to the gym and then you’re sore for a day. They’re in pain all the time.”

The effort was worth it in the end, kick-starting the kind of unforgettable fight sequences that would become a staple in the franchise, but he continues to feel its impact.

“I mean, it’s still in the body,” Fishburne told the audience. “We each had two trainers, and they worked us really, really hard!”

The actor reprised the role of Morpheus in 2003’s The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, but he was absent from the franchise’s 2021 sequel, The Matrix Resurrections, despite voicing a desire to be part of it.

While visiting The View earlier this year, Fishburne said he had volunteered to take on the part for the most recent installment alongside other original stars like Reeves, Moss, and Jada Pinkett Smith, but he wasn’t welcomed with open arms.

“I offered my services to the fourth Matrix and they didn’t respond well to that,” he said on the show. “It’s not like I didn’t say, ‘I’d like to offer my services.’ I did. For whatever reason, that didn’t happen. But that’s the truth.”

Instead, Watchmen and Candyman star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II was tapped to play a different version of Neo’s mentor.

“It was my job not to give a literal impersonation of Laurence Fishburne’s performance as Morpheus, but to understand that history,” Abdul-Mateen told Entertainment Weekly at the time of the movie’s release. “I was fortunate enough to play a character who was aware of the history of the Matrix but also growing into his own. He had a growth and a rebirth to go through for his own self. I looked at that as an opportunity to create a character with some freedom and expression, and to really find out what it was that I, as Morpheus, liked about myself, and what I had to contribute to the world and what I had to say in this universe.”

Fishburne later reacted to the finished product in a 2022 interview with Variety. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be,” he said of the film, “and it wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be.”

When View cohost Sara Haines asked Fishburne about potentially appearing in the upcoming fifth Matrix movie — which Warner Bros. announced in April — the actor responded, “It depends on the circumstances, who was involved, how well the script has been written. If they offer me [a part]… We’ll see.”

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