The “godawful” movie that changed John Goodman’s life forever: “It just bothers me”
Few actors hate watching themselves onscreen as much as John Goodman, but on one of the rare occasions that he did, it gave him the kick up the arse he desperately needed to get his house in order.
Even the best in the business are prone to bouts of crippling self-doubt, and Goodman fits the bill on both counts. Everybody knows that he’s one of modern Hollywood’s finest character actors, but as far as he can see, he’s been unwatchable in everything he’s made, apart from The Big Lebowski.
Those anxieties, coupled with his battles with depression, have conspired to give the Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy winner an incredibly low opinion of himself, both personally and professionally. He’s adamant that he squandered his only shot at working with Martin Scorsese, and he wishes he could do one of his best performances, in the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink, all over again because he whiffed.
Needless to say, a combination of low confidence, depression, alcoholism, and cocaine did Goodman no favours for a long time, and that’s without considering how he felt about his appearance. For decades, he was either the jolly fat guy, the angry fat guy, or the sinister fat guy, and as much as he excelled at all of them, he was miserable with his weight and could barely stand to look at himself.
The turning point, randomly enough, was a made-for-television movie that aired in December 2006 before being released straight-to-video the very next day. NBC’s The Year Without a Santa Claus cast Goodman in the title role as the jolliest fat man of them all, and it was the point of no return that made him more determined than ever to turn his entire life around.
“I wish I wasn’t as fat as I am,” he lamented to The Telegraph. “When I saw a film in which I played Santa Claus recently, I walked away thinking, ‘This is just godawful. I look terrible. I want to have my mouth sewn shut’. And it got me to lose about 70 pounds. Then I started to edge back up again.”
In a case of art imitating life, the film was every bit as godawful as Goodman thought he looked in it, with The Year Without a Santa Claus getting a critical lump of coal in its stocking. As you’d expect from an actor of his talent, he wasn’t its biggest problem, but not even he was able to elevate a festive turkey that couldn’t wish upon a half-decent review.
Since then, though, he hasn’t looked back. After three decades of struggling with alcoholism, Goodman gave up the booze the year after his turn as the North Pole’s resident sleigh rider had premiered, and began to turn everything around. By his own recollections, he weighed in at a hefty 392 pounds in 2007.
Fast forward to today, and Goodman has shed a remarkable 200 pounds, and it’s not often anyone can call a combination of winning the fight against alcoholism and playing Santa Claus as the impetus for such a drastic transformation.
