Morgan Freeman doesn’t remember making “war” with Russia video, Russian prankster to reveal in new prank call

In a now unlisted video produced in September 2017 by Hollywood actor and filmmaker Robert Reiner’s Committee to Investigate Russia, Morgan Freeman made headlines around the world and spurred strong reactions from Moscow after accusing the Russian government of interfering in the 2016 presidential elections — something Mr. Freeman in the video equated to an attack on the United States.

“Morgan Freeman was duped like Colin Powell was a while back,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on her Facebook page at the time, elaborating on an intentional effort by the Obama Administration to prevent their secret wiretapping of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort before and after the election from becoming “a new Watergate.”

Months later in a December 2017 interview with the Associated Press, Mr. Freeman defended his participation in the controversial video. “That’s politics. I was asked and I did it,” he said, shrugging off the criticism. When asked if he believed in what he said in the video, Mr. Freeman affirmed he did. “You don’t say shit you don’t believe.”

But Russian prankster Alexey Stolyarov, who goes by the nickname “Lexus”, is preparing to release a new prank call in which Mr. Freeman claims he now doesn’t even remember making the video. In the call, Mr. Freeman and his producer Lori McCreary talk with who they believe to be Greta Thunberg and her father about the honeybee hives Freeman cares for on his estate before “Greta” (played by an unidentified female friend of prankster Lexus), turns the focus of their conversation to the environmental records of China and Russia.

“Recently Greta was invited to Russia for a climate strike,” says Lexus, who plays the role of Greta’s father in the prank, “but we have some fear that Putin will use this visit in [sic] his PR purpose. I heard that you participated in the campaign against [Russia’s] interference.”

“I don’t know if I did… I hope I did,” the actor says in the call, prompting McCreary to speak up and mention the Robert Reiner “war” video from 2017. “Oh, I can’t remember,” Freeman says.

Prankster Lexus, 34, a native of Yekaterinburg, Russia, has been successfully pranking actors, athletes, lawmakers, prime ministers, and other heads of state from around the world for over six years, yet his prank calls lately have been just as successful and ambitious regardless of the international media attention they have garnered. “You’ve seen Borat,” Lexus says, comparing himself to actor Sasha Baron Cohen. “He’s been working for a long time and still has his own victims. So, it still happens, even with high officials. He pranks them in person but I think that everyone knows who he is.”

Last spring, Lexus managed to arrange a call with Prince Harry, who had been living in Canada at the time. The prince shared his unfiltered thoughts about US President Donald Trump and the royal family in a call he, like Morgan Freeman, believed to be with Greta Thunberg and her father calling about cooperating on climate change campaigns.

Likewise, US Senator and then-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders took a similar call from Lexus around the same time last year during the 2020 presidential primaries. The pranksters offered Greta Thunberg and her father’s support for Sanders — a high-profile endorsement the Senator was more than happy to accept heading into Super Tuesday just weeks after tying with Pete Buttigieg for first in the Iowa caucuses.

The prankster has also been on the phone with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, Kamala Harris while still Senator for California, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, Oregon Governor Kate Brown, Representative Maxine Waters, and Monika Lewinsky. Though his prank calls have not only been limited to political figures. His other victims — a word he uses in reference to the targets of his prank calls — also include Hollywood personalities like Sharon Stone, Harrison Ford, and Woody Harrelson, and celebrity musicians Billie Eilish, and Brian May of Queen.

Lexus says he’ll publish his newest prank call with Morgan Freeman next week, yet promises there are many more prank calls — some already done, others still in the works — coming up. “We have a lot of such pranks,” he said, adding that some of the yet unreleased pranks include calls with Americans.

Stolyarov, who works together with a fellow Russian prankster by the nickname Vovan, says there’s no proof he works for the Russian government despite what some people believe. Yet he also acknowledges that there is no evidence that he doesn’t. “You can’t prove that we work for [Putin]. And we can’t give you any document that proves that we don’t work for him,” prankster Lexus said.

Vovan, whose real name is Vladimir, also rejects claims he’s a Russian agent, saying it doesn’t make much sense that Russian President Putin has some big telephone book with the phone numbers of Hollywood actors and actresses and American government officials from which they organize their pranks. He says arranging the prank calls, especially in the case of American politicians, can be a lengthy process and involves emailing their staffers from an official-looking email address and piquing their interest with some topic. “We communicate through their schedulers and if they agree to talk to us, they give us a time and date but it could be months in the future,” he said, adding that no one helps them make the connection. “We can only rely on ourselves.”

Yet how the two manage to time and time again get some of the most high-profile public figures in the world on the phone — something the average person would likely not be able to do— remains a mystery. In the meantime, the two publish their pranks, often adding animated parody reenactments of the calls, on their YouTube channel.