10 Things You Didn't Know About The Shawshank Redemption
5. Morgan Freeman's Son Has Multiple Cameos In The Film
Who better to play your younger self than your own son? It's a thought process that Darabont obviously followed when filming Shawshank, because none other than Morgan Freeman's son appears on-screen to play not only a younger version of his dear father but also appears in a few shots as a regular inmate. The above is slightly deceptive though, while Alfonso Freeman does indeed appear on-screen as an inmate on several occasions (most notably when the prison staff are handing out mail to the crowd of inmates), his role of playing a younger version of his father was on paper only. In the scenes where Red attends his parole hearings and becomes increasingly frustrated with the system failing him, we're always privy to a shot of his parole papers portraying him as he would have been in 1926 - the year that he was arrested for murder. Yeah, you've obviously guessed it by now, but those documents actually featured Morgan's son Alfonso on them, so it was his mug that was subjected to the repeated stamps of 'parole denied' in bright red ink. It's a small detail, but one no less interesting; Frank Darabont obviously wanted everything to look and feel authentic.
Joe is a freelance games journalist who, while not spending every waking minute selling himself to websites around the world, spends his free time writing. Most of it makes no sense, but when it does, he treats each article as if it were his Magnum Opus - with varying results.
