“The clues are all there”: John Goodman’s fear and self-loathing in Hampstead
Sometimes when we’re watching actors on TV at home or on the big screen in the cinema, we forget that they didn’t arrive there as fully fledged stars, full of charisma and an air of authority.
Sometimes there are years, even decades of hard work beforehand, dragging themselves round to auditions, struggling for parts and cash, which was certainly the case for John Goodman, the Coen brothers’ favourite and Roseanne’s husband.
Goodman started out on stage in the 1970s, living in New York and doing anything he could do to pick up jobs, desperately hoping for a break as he handed out headshots and toiled in order to scrape together the money for a decent meal, often going without.
It was only after he had done this for years that a minor break happened after an advertising executive picked up his picture, which led to a few paid roles. Perhaps that’s why Goodman has, ever since, apparently never felt quite comfortable with success in the medium he excels at, having panic attacks on stage in the ‘80s, getting furious with himself for forgetting dialogue in rehearsals, waving off accolades about his performances.
But once he had landed the male lead in Roseanne, the network comedy that became one of America’s favourites, his financial worries were over at least and his career went astronomic, doing commercial movies like the Flintstones reboot at the same time as the Coen brothers began to cast him in critically acclaimed movies, starting with Barton Fink in 1991 and encompassing another five in the years since, including the cult classic The Big Lebowski and the beautiful Inside Llewyn Davis in 2013.
A couple of years after that film, he found himself back on stage, this time on this side of the pond as he took on a role in the play American Buffalo at the Wyndham theatre alongside Homeland’s Damian Lewis. Written by legendary playwright and Pulitzer Prize winner David Mamet back in 1975, the play won several awards on Broadway when it was first staged and attracted talent like the late Robert Duvall for its debut run in 1977, eventually made into a movie starring Dustin Hoffman in 1996.
Goodman spoke to The Guardian back in 2015, during which he was living in Hampstead, one of London’s more salubrious boroughs, but still displaying all the signs of someone who focuses pathologically on his craft. He displayed that anger at having, in his mind, made a mess of the rehearsal dialogue, saying, “I was banging out some lines unsuccessfully,” adding an explanation about performing Mamet’s writing, “The clues are all there: everything is on the page that you need, but the dialogue is intricate. There are a lot of no-s, yes-es, uh-huhs that have to be in the right places. But there’s a rhythm to it that’s structured and performed properly; it just takes off. It’s very interesting. It’s a staccato drum-like thing.”
The play, about three wasters in a Chicago junk shop, received excellent reviews once it began at the Wyndham, as did Goodman’s performance as the store’s owner, Don Dubrow, and the following year, he made one of his most popular recent movies, the sci-fi horror 10 Cloverfield Lane, which was a huge hit.
This year, he will star alongside Tom Cruise in the Alejandro González Iñárritu movie Digger, which is already tipped for awards acclaim, plus the intriguing Chili Finger with Bryan Cranston about a woman who finds a severed finger in her food and tries to blackmail the offending restaurant.
