Jamie Foxx names his biggest musical influence: “I dug everything”
Many of us have traditions that we fall back on at Christmas time, whether it’s watching Home Alone on the telly, buying a hilarious novelty jumper to wear at the table for the turkey dinner, or carefully curating a detailed and comprehensive list of anyone who has wronged you during the year in order to take terrible and merciless revenge against them.
But if you’re Hollywood actor Jamie Foxx, your tradition is to spend an insane amount of money on Christmas lights for your house, just because you can.
Every year, Foxx will blow the equivalent of the GDP of a small country on the display at his mega-mansion. Perhaps he does that because, unlike other comedians like Will Ferrell or Vince Vaughn, he’s never been in a proper Christmas movie. However, earlier this year, he did star in an action thriller called Tin Soldier, which is tenuously festive, I suppose.
Unfortunately, it was anything but a gift to anyone, with it being critically panned across the board and a cast including Scott Eastwood, who is never really very good in anything, and Robert De Niro, who, sadly, these days will basically say yes to everything involving a camera as long as you pay him enough money.
It marks a bit of a drop-off for Foxx, who for a time was undeniably one of the major forces in both movies, music and comedy, especially between around 2004 and 2015. Coming from a background of stand-up and sitcoms, he broke into the acting big leagues thanks to a role alongside Will Smith in the boxing biopic Ali in 2001 and three years later had the kind of 12 months that actors dream of.
He became part of an exclusive club, only 12 people in history, in fact, to be nominated for Oscars for two different films in the same year, firstly for the Michael Mann thriller Collateral opposite Tom Cruise, and then again for Ray, the musical biopic about legendary blind singer-songwriter Ray Charles.
It sparked a period of dominance for Foxx, who used his uncanny impression of Charles to great effect on the Kanye West smash ‘Gold Digger’, and then appeared in a string of major movies, including Miami Vice with Colin Farrell, Beyonce’s Dreamgirls and Quentin Tarantino’s bloody epic Django Unchained, which he took the lead in. And he did all this while releasing double-platinum albums.
As for his own musical influences, Foxx names gospel music, especially the vocal group the Clark sisters, but one much-missed icon stood out for him above all the others. Foxx told radio station WBLS: “A young man by the name of Prince Nelson Rogers, you guys know him as Prince. Everything about this guy, I dug. Everything about his music, because of what it was, I call it delicious music, it’s like you could almost taste the music he was making. My Grandmother would say: ‘That little Prince is the Devil, I don’t want him in this house’… But listening to his music, I even knew all the B-Sides… I even tried to wear my hair like him, which didn’t work out, ‘cos I didn’t have the right type of hair and I had too much forehead.”
After suffering a stroke in 2023, Foxx has rebounded to start working on a variety of projects, including a Mike Tyson mini-series and a long-awaited basketball comedy called All-Star Weekend, which began filming some seven years ago with Robert Downey Jr.
There are also rumours of him lining up for a remake of the Sam Peckinpah bloodbath The Wild Bunch, plus he’s finished filming Fight for ‘84, about a boxing coach trying to put together a squad for the Olympics after the original fighters were lost in a plane crash.
