The only one of his movies John Goodman was genuinely excited to watch: “I was totally sucked in”
Samuel L Jackson is one of the few actors who openly admits that he loves watching himself onscreen, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, his Kong: Skull Island co-star, John Goodman, exists at the polar opposite end of the spectrum for several reasons.
For one thing, Goodman is firmly in the camp of performers who try their hardest not to watch anything they’ve made after they’ve finished making it. It’s an understandable practice, since thespians are always likely to point out every single flaw in their performance if they revisit it with fresh eyes.
There’s also the fact that, despite being one of his generation’s most celebrated, versatile, and prolific character actors, he’s never rated himself very highly. Even though there are mountains of evidence to the contrary, Goodman can’t bear the sight of his own work as one of cinema’s most self-critical stars.
There are rare exceptions, though, with the Coen brothers regular naming his formidable turn as Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski as the only one of his turns that he can watch objectively, but in typical fashion, he doesn’t put that down to anything he did, but the writing being “so goddamned good.”
This is a guy who worked with Martin Scorsese and hated himself for it, wished he could redo several of his most popular and acclaimed performances, and felt ashamed of becoming successful as the star of a ratings-grabbing sitcom, so when Goodman says there’s a film of his that he couldn’t wait to see, it must have been something truly special.
And it was, provided you’re one of the kids who grew up in the late 1990s obsessed with watching Peter Hewitt’s The Borrowers over and over again. The kid-friendly fantasy flick was idolised and admired by the generation of tykes who were in the sweet spot demographically when it was released, making Goodman something of an outlier.
“It was better than I had imagined,” he informed The Irish Times. “I was totally sucked in. Just the way that everything was integrated. And it took me aback: ‘Oh my god, this is special effects.'” The Borrowers is a solid little flick that did exactly what it said on the tin, but for whatever reason, an actor who refuses to watch his own movies even once if he doesn’t have to couldn’t wait to see it for himself.
It’s always the titles you least expect, with the literary adaptation being placed on rare footing alongside The Big Lebowski as one of the very, very, very few John Goodman films that John Goodman didn’t just begrudgingly sit through, but actively desired to see with his own two eyes, such was his excitement.
Does it still hold up? Honestly, having not seen it in at least 25 years and probably a few more on top of that, fuck knows. If it’s good enough for Goodman, though, then maybe it’s worth another bash, just to see if you can grasp why he was so enamoured by those tiny people and their antics.
