“The talent there is matchless”: how London “rejuvenated” a burnt-out John Goodman
Much as we’re pretty good at cooked breakfasts, apologising profusely, chess (probably), misjudging the arrival of summer and holding doors open for people, Britain doesn’t really have much to shout about these days.
Which kind of makes it heartening that, possibly due to their own country being run by an enormous psychopathic Wotsit with a God complex, some Americans still like to cross over the sea and enjoy what little we have to offer, like John Goodman, for example.
The former Roseanne star and Coen brothers’ actor of choice has spent plenty of time on these fair isles of ours, soaking up the overcast grey and tucking into a Sunday roast beef dinner, although given his ever-decreasing appearance, you might imagine he’s skipped those for a while.
Being a big name in movies, there is, of course, one place in particular he likes to hang out while he’s here: London, the exciting capital city where if you hold your phone out long enough, someone will generously appear and take it home for you on a bike, albeit to their home unfortunately.
Goodman spent some time appearing at the Wyndham theatre back in 2015 alongside Homeland’s Damian Lewis for a David Mamet play called American Buffalo, during which he spent his time living in Hampstead, a part of London so posh that it has actual swimming pools without shopping trolleys in them and which at one point was noted to have more millionaires within its cafe-lined boundaries than any other part of the UK. Given that, it’s probably no wonder that he thought to himself ‘Well this is alright’ and came back again three years later.
That time, in 2018, he was about to revisit his Rosanne character in a spin-off called The Conners when he hopped on a plane and came to visit us once more, for a drama called Black Earth Rising, which was a co-production between the BBC and Netflix and was about a Rwandan-born female lawyer trying to bring international war criminals to justice. Goodman also played a lawyer in the show, and it appears it was just what he needed, telling Deadline at the time that the experience filming in London “rejuvenated” him after being “tired and burned out from a long year”.
He added, “I was also drawn to the prospect of working in London… Maybe 12 months out of the year, I’d like to work in London. The talent there is matchless; I don’t want to get myself into trouble for saying that, but everybody is just so willing to pitch in. They’re so well-prepared and crafted. I have a great respect for them.”
Black Earth Rising, which ran for eight episodes, received excellent reviews, but didn’t come without tragedy; on a night shoot on location in Ghana, a camera operator involved in a stunt was hit by a Land Rover and died.
Goodman meanwhile has plenty of projects to keep him busy over the next year or so, including the forthcoming Tom Cruise black comedy Digger, but none of them seem to be based in the UK, so if he wants to enjoy eating a Greggs chicken bake while sitting on a mobility scooter doing a scratchcard, he’ll just have to book a holiday here like everyone else does.
