Academy Award® winner Morgan Freeman will join the cast of the upcoming original series Lioness alongside series lead and executive producer Zoe Saldaña, Academy Award winner and executive producer Nicole Kidman, and Laysla De Oliveira. Freeman will play Edwin Mullins, the United States Secretary of State. From Academy Award nominee Taylor Sheridan, Lioness is produced by MTV Entertainment Studios and 101 Studios exclusively for Paramount+.
Lioness is based on a real-life CIA program and follows Cruz Manuelos (De Oliveira), a rough-around-the-edges but passionate young Marine recruited to join the CIA’s Lioness Engagement Team to help bring down a terrorist organisation from within. Saldaña will play Joe, the station chief of the Lioness program tasked with training, managing and leading her female undercover operatives.
Lioness will also star series regulars Dave Annable, Jill Wagner, LaMonica Garrett, James Jordan, Austin Hébert, Jonah Wharton, Stephanie Nur and Hannah Love Lanier. The series is executive produced by Taylor Sheridan, David C. Glasser, Zoe Saldaña, Nicole Kidman, Ron Burkle, Bob Yari, David Hutkin, Jill Wagner, Geyer Kosinski, Michael Malone and John Hillcoat.
Academy Award winning actor Morgan Freeman ranks within the Top 10 worldwide top-grossing actors of all time, with his films having earned over $5 billion in cumulative ticket sales. In 2005, Freeman won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his role in Million Dollar Baby. Freeman also received an Academy Award nomination in 1987 for Best Supporting Actor for Street Smart, in 1994 for Best Actor for The Shawshank Redemption, and in 2010 for Best Actor for Invictus. He also won the Golden Globe for Best Actor for his performance in Driving Miss Daisy in 1990.
Freeman has been honoured with the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, the Golden Globes Cecil B. DeMille Award and the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award. Freeman also received the coveted Kennedy Center Honor for his distinguished acting, and was honoured with the Hollywood Actor Award from the Hollywood Film Festival.
In addition to his Academy Award nomination for his role as Nelson Mandela in Invictus, Freeman also won the National Board of Review Award for Best Actor, received a Golden Globe nomination, and a Broadcast Critics Association nomination. Freeman will next be seen in feature films A Good Person, Paradise Highway, Comeback Trail and Muti. Other feature films include Vanquish, Coming 2 America, The Comeback Trail, The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, Angel has Fallen, The Poison Rose, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, Just Getting Started, Going In Style, Paramount Pictures’ Ben-Hur, Now You See Me 2, London Has Fallen, Ted 2, Last Knights, Lucy, Dolphin Tale 2, Transcendence, The Lego Movie, Last Vegas, Now You See Me, Oblivion, Olympus Has Fallen and The Dark Knight Rises.
Other credits include Dolphin’s Tale, Born to be Wild 3D, The Dark Knight, The Bucket List, Glory, Clean and Sober, Lean on Me, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Unforgiven, Se7en, Kiss the Girls, Amistad, Deep Impact, Nurse Betty, The Sum of All Fears, Bruce Almighty, Nurse Betty, Coriolanus, Attica, Brubaker, Eyewitness, Death of a Prophet and Along Came a Spider.
In television, he was most recently seen in his Emmy-nominated guest star role in The Kominsky Method, and the sci-fi anthology series Solos. He also starred in the Children’s program The Electric Company. Freeman has served as an Executive Producer on Madam Secretary for CBS, the true drama, The Killing of Kenneth Chamberlain, and Princess of the Row. Freeman also hosted and produced a nonfiction series entitled Great Escapes with Morgan Freeman. Freeman has narrated the documentary March of the Penguins 2: The Next Step, for which he received an Emmy nomination, The C-Word, Island of Lemurs: Madagascar, Stem Cell Universe with Stephen Hawking and We the People. Past narrations include two Academy Award-winning documentaries, The Long Way Home and The March of The Penguins.
On stage, Freeman won a Drama Desk Award and a Tony Nomination for his role as Zeke in The Mighty Gents. Other stage credits include the Alfred Uhry play Driving Miss Daisy. In 1973 he co-founded the Frank Silvera Writers’ Workshop, now in its 37th season, which seeks to serve successful playwrights of the new millennium.
