Laurence Fishburne

Fishburne began acting as a child, landing a role on a daytime soap opera before he was even a teenager and going on to shoot a major war film in his early teens, an unusually intense start to a career built on early, serious dramatic work.

Morpheus — equal parts prophet, coach and pirate captain — delivers philosophy in a voice that could bend spoons on its own. Already an accomplished stage and film actor with an Academy Award nomination for What's Love Got to Do with It, he brought a theatrical gravity to Morpheus's monologues that grounded the film's more esoteric philosophy.

His red-pill-and-blue-pill scene has become one of the most quoted and referenced moments in modern cinema, and the role remains one of the most culturally pervasive of his long and varied acting career.