The 2011 movie that saved John Goodman’s career from the scrapheap: “I’d pretty much had it”
A busy actor is not necessarily a happy actor, so even though he was never out of work for too long, John Goodman was still troubled by the notion that his career had started to circle the drain.
Obviously, there was no real danger of him being left at home, twiddling his thumbs and desperately hoping for the next script to drop through his letterbox. He’s John fucking Goodman, after all, and as one of the industry’s foremost character actors, the next movie was never too far away.
However, quantity had started to take precedence over quality, leaving him to wonder if his best days were well and truly behind him. To put things into perspective, between 1996 and 2019, there were only two years where Goodman didn’t appear in at least two features, so he wasn’t on the unemployment line.
That said, somewhere in the middle of that run, the good parts seemed to dry up. Things reached a head around the 2010s, when the Coen brothers regular realised that what he’d been making was mostly shite. We’re not exaggerating, either, looking at the 11 films he starred in from August 2007 to October 2010 alone.
James Wan’s Death Sentence was a panned flop, Evan Almighty was panned even harder and flopped even harder, Speed Racer was another bust, Confessions of a Shopaholic was turgid fluff, and the only interesting thing about Pope Joan was that it got him sued and was roundly denounced by the Vatican.
In terms of volume, those were not lean years. In terms of worthwhile projects, they most certainly were. “I was sitting around for a couple of months, and the phone wasn’t ringing,” Goodman acknowledged. “And it was very difficult, because I thought I’d pretty much had it. I was trying to start to think of what I could do to create work for myself.”
As often tends to be the case in Hollywood, salvation was right around the corner. Goodman’s first movie of 2011 was The Artist, which won five Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’. In his second, he was the best thing by miles in Kevin Smith’s Red State, the filmmaker’s best work in years, and his third, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, was another ‘Best Picture’ nominee.
The following year, he lent support in his second consecutive ‘Best Picture’ winner when he played John Chambers in Ben Affleck’s Argo, stole every scene he was in opposite Denzel Washington in Robert Zemeckis’ Flight, and reunited with the Coens for the first time in over a decade in Inside Llewyn Davis, with The Hangover Part III and Monsters University adding two huge hits by the end of 2013.
You can’t really call it a comeback, since Goodman never went away, but after churning out terrible film after terrible film just a couple of years previously, he found his groove again, and in some style, too.
