The role that almost slipped through John Goodman’s fingers: “I couldn’t come up with a character”
In 1990, John Goodman was riding high on the success of Roseanne, the hit sitcom that brought him into the homes of millions of Americans every single week. Charming audiences as the salt-of-the-earth trucker Dan Conner wasn’t enough for the actor, though, who still pursued a movie career anytime his TV schedule allowed it.
In 1989, the year after Roseanne began airing, Goodman appeared with Al Pacino in the serial killer thriller Sea of Love, and followed that up with a starring role in Steven Spielberg’s fantasy romance Always. Working with the iconic director of classics like Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and ET the Extra-Terrestrial soon begot more work for Goodman, because he impressed the helmer so much that Spielberg lined up two other roles for him.
To Goodman’s chagrin, one of those roles was Fred Flintstone in a live-action version of the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon, The Flintstones. The actor wasn’t a happy camper that Spielberg wanted him to go to Bedrock to play everyone’s favourite Stone Age family man, not least because the director announced it in front of the Always cast and crew. However, he did end up agreeing to star in the film against his better judgment.
The other role, though, was much more up Goodman’s alley. He had taken to “hanging out” at the Amblin Entertainment offices, and he admitted that rubbing elbows with Spielberg and his cohorts “felt like the most natural thing in the world.” In fact, a smiling Goodman told Vanity Fair that he couldn’t help thinking, “Well, I guess I’m finally where I belong.”
At that time, Frank Marshall – Spielberg’s longtime producer and co-founder of Amblin – was preparing to make his directorial debut with a skin-crawling comedy horror that pitted a sleepy American town against an invasion of deadly Amazonian spiders. While hanging around Amblin, Goodman came into contact with Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chairman of Walt Disney Studios, who would distribute the film. The super producer pitched him on the role of eccentric exterminator Delbert McClintock, and before he knew, Goodman had signed up to star in Arachnophobia.
To his horror, Goodman soon discovered the vast difference between agreeing to make a film and actually inhabiting a character. He knew McClintock was supposed to add comic relief to the film, but the style and tone of the performance were all his purview. However, try as he might, he couldn’t settle on an interesting, unique way to portray McClintock. In fact, he confessed, “I couldn’t come up with a character to save my life.” As pre-production ended and the shoot’s start date began looming, Goodman was still racking his brain to come up with something, anything, that got his juices flowing. Then, it clicked.
“I just remembered a high school biology teacher that I had,” Goodman recalled. “I always thought he was pretty funny. So, that’s what I based the character on.”
Suddenly, instead of arriving to set on day one completely unprepared, Goodman showed up with his character fully formed. McClintock was a bizarrely entertaining guy who had a sleepy, almost disembodied vocal delivery and a maniacal dedication to killing arachnids. When Goodman told Marshall that he’d based the character on an oddball teacher, who supposedly moonlighted as an exterminator, the director was tickled pink.
“As actors do, they bring personal experiences to it,” Marshall told SyFy Wire in 2024. “That’s what made the character funny. The first time he came up, he just did the character, and I loved it, and I said, ‘Do more of that.'”
