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''I never wanted to be a movie star,'' insists Morgan Freeman. ''I never wanted to be a personality. Then all you do is turn yourself into what the audience wants and play it over and over. That's what movie stars do.''

Actually, some of them -- Morgan Freeman, for instance -- manage to be both astonishingly versatile and what audiences want. In more than 20 films over 30 years, the 63-year-old three-time Oscar nominee has played everything from a pimp to the President. Which is why Freeman wasn't all that keen on reprising his role of psychologist-detective Alex Cross (last seen rescuing Ashley Judd from a serial killer in 1997's Kiss the Girls) for the prequel, Along Came a Spider. ''I had a philosophic aversion to it,'' he explains. ''I didn't want to do the same thing twice.''

Of course, there are differences. For instance, this time Freeman's gorgeous costar is Monica Potter. Still, that's not why he decided to do the film. Breakfasting on steak and eggs in Westwood, Calif., last month, he laid out his reasoning. ''I realized that my philosophical aversion was bulls -- -,'' he says. ''I realized I liked Alex Cross. And the fact that he's black is totally incidental. That's a rare thing for a black actor to find.'' Plus, he adds, paraphrasing a line from Driving Miss Daisy, ''It's lovely to be wanted.'' Here he discusses other career choices.

NURSE BETTY (2000), played Charlie, a hitman on the verge of retirement whose last mission is to hunt down Renee Zellweger's Betty: ''I saw [director] Neil LaBute's first movie, In the Company of Men, and I thought it sucked deeply. I mean, talk about a couple of scuzzy guys. Man, they were turds. But I was intrigued by the mind that would think this up and film it. Then I saw LaBute's second movie, Your Friends & Neighbors. Not any better, but still intriguing. That scene with Jason Patric in the steam room -- I've never seen him do such good work. So then I got the script for Nurse Betty, and I loved it and I went and met him. And it turns out he's married, has these lovely kids. He's just this big bear of a man. Cuddly, even. It didn't take any persuading to convince me to do the film.''

DEEP IMPACT (1998), played President Tom Beck: ''When I was doing press for Deep Impact, reporters would always ask me how it felt to play the first black President, and I'd tell them, 'I'm not playing the first black President. I'm playing a President who happens to be black.' Or they'd ask me what sort of research I did for the role. Research? What kind of research do you need to play the President? He's a guy. Truman was a haberdasher. Eisenhower was a soldier. Reagan was an actor. Besides, we all know what Presidents are like standing up there in a press conference. Hell, you don't have to do any research to play a President.''

AMISTAD (1997), played abolitionist activist Theodore Joadson: ''Steven Spielberg is an incredibly efficient filmmaker. I think he knows in his gut how to make a film. But Amistad was a huge disappointment at the box office. [Slavery] is subject matter that Americans don't want to confront. Americans relate to it the way Germans relate to the Holocaust. So people just didn't want to see it.''


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