The 2014 movie that gave John Goodman “the best goddamn time” of his career
Although he’s played a fair few jolly fat men in his career, including the jolliest fat man of them all, John Goodman has developed a habit of reflecting on his years in the business with abject misery.
As mentioned, he played the title role in The Year Without a Santa Claus, and it made him miserable, so he clearly didn’t embrace the method when getting into character. Goodman is one of the best in the business at what he does, but try telling him that, because he refuses to believe it.
With The Big Lebowski as the sole outlier, the veteran character actor can’t bring himself to revisit his work. While that’s a problem that many thespians share, apart from Samuel L Jackson, who loves watching himself, Goodman has even been critical of his most acclaimed performances and pictures.
Joel and Ethan Coen know how to bring out the best in him, but when he got the chance to work with Martin Scorsese on Bringing Out the Dead, all he could remember about it was how badly he’d let himself, the film, and its legendary director down, which has become a recurring theme for Goodman.
That’s not to say that he laments everything he’s ever done, even if there have been quite a few of those projects, too, and when making a rare detour into the positive side of his filmography, the veteran inevitably named “anything with Joel and Ethan Coen’s name on it” as his most memorable experiences.
Apart from his long-term collaborators, George Clooney’s The Monuments Men got a special mention. Goodman had an absolute blast making the wartime adventure, even if his reunion with The Artist co-star Jean Dujardin didn’t go to plan when his Academy Award-winning colleague called him a cunt.
“It didn’t do too well,” he pointed out, with the World War II caper failing to deliver on the promise of having Goodman, Clooney, Dujardin, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, and the rest of the star-studded cast locating and salvaging priceless arts and antiquities before the Nazis can destroy them.
On the other hand, he had a ball. “I just had the best goddamn time making it and hanging with the company,” he reminisced, especially working with the film’s top-billed star, co-writer, producer, and director. “He’s one of the best people I’ve ever met in my life, just down to earth, and he’s got a hear the size of all outdoors.”
It’s rare to hear Goodman being so unabashedly positive about anything he’s been in, which just goes to show how much fun he had shooting The Monuments Men, even if it hardly set the world on fire.
