Martin Scorsese, missed opportunities, and the movie John Goodman will always regret
John Goodman has had a somewhat strange career. He is one actor who has achieved that most useful of qualities: being both well-known and yet able to vanish into a part. Goodman has had a whole host of mainstream successes. In addition to Roseanne, a sitcom that launched his career, Goodman has taken on huge parts in The Flintstones and an iconic voice role in the Monsters Inc series. But he has also delivered some cult classics, too.
Moving into a charcater actor space as time moved on, Goodman gave himself entirely to his work, most notably in his stunning performance as Walter Sobchak in the Coen brothers’ cult classic The Big Lebowski. The actor would work with the dynamic brothers on six more occasions, making him one of their most frequent collaborators.
To work with such a uniquely positioned set of filmmakers may well be an actor’s sincerest joys. Sure, fame and fortune has its perks, even the odd golden statuette can make you feel like a lifetime in artistic pursuit can be worthwhile. But the real reward is getting to work with brilliant artists in their fields. One such director performers are always desperate to work alongside is the powerhouse filmmaker Martin Scorsese.
Emerging in the 1970s as one of the most important voices in the movie industry, Scorsese ran through a reel of pictures that have since become Hollywood classics. Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and later gangster stalwarts like Goodfellas, Casino, and The Irishman have all become noted legendary moments in cinema. It means that Scorsese’s name on a project is bound to draw in the greatest actors, and in 1999, Goodman would get the chance to work with the esteemed director on Bringing Out The Dead.
Nicolas Cage plays a burnt-out paramedic seemingly haunted by the lives he could not save. It’s typical Scorsese fare, as our protagonist walks the streets of New York‘s Hell’s Kitchen with the bedraggled benevolence of a Christ-like figure. Goodman plays a seasoned but apathetic paramedic partner named Larry, a role that suits his laconic delivery and ability to play within the lines of an intense plot. However, for Goodman, the moment was soured by personal problems.
“Oh, I was in a bad place,” remembered Goodman when speaking to Yahoo. “My wife brought my daughter up for the shoot, and she got appendicitis. I got home from work at about six in the morning. She had been up all night. We brought a doctor in. We had to get her to a hospital in midday Manhattan and it was impossible. I was not getting a lot of sleep. Dan Aykroyd and his family took care of my daughter for a while when I was working.”
A nightmare for parents at the best of times, but Goodman candidly revealed that he was also struggling with his mental health at the time too: “I was in a bad place mentally then. I wish I would have been present for the film because I feel I wasted a great opportunity.”
The chance to work on such an intense project was likely a difficult thing to do when enduring your own mental fragility, but Goodman did enjoy working in his old neighborhoods, noting: “We got to work nights, there was nobody around. That was kind of cool”. However, the real missed opportunity, and why the actor will always regret the project was his chance to work with Scorsese.
The chance to be a part of a Scorsese project doesn’t come along too often, but Goodman was certain that he hadn’t burned a bridge, telling Yahoo: “I don’t think he even considers me to have burned a bridge. I’m not worried about that. I had some problems going on at the time.”
It’s a welcome reminder that behind the credits, the fame and the fortune, Hollywood actors are just humans too. As we all may approach a day at work, struggling to align with a new era in our lives or get over a specific problem, so do actors. Regretfully for Goodman, one of those days occurred when he got the chance to work with the world’s greatest living director.
