The 1980s director who told Jamie Foxx he couldn’t act: “You stink, you’re terrible”
There are several ways to give people feedback. Some focus on the positives, others try what’s called a compliment sandwich, where you hide a bit of negative filling between two slices of positive bread, and then others prefer the direct approach, like when Oliver Stone straight out told Jamie Foxx he was rubbish at his job.
Surprisingly, that didn’t result in an older man being punched in the face by a younger man, as we’ll come to, but it is a lesson in the fact that sometimes people do actually respond quite well to not having things sugar-coated. And it set Foxx on the way to winning an Oscar.
The set-to came back at the tail end of the 1990s, when Stone was casting for the Al Pacino sports drama Any Given Sunday, the story of a veteran American football team attempting to deal with its struggling players and narcissistic young quarterback. Surprisingly, Stone originally cast Sean ‘P Diddy’ Combs in the role of the mouthy star man, but he dropped out due to reportedly not being able to throw a ball properly.
Then Will Smith, Cuba Gooding Jr and Chris Tucker were all considered, but they either declined or weren’t right for the role for Stone. That led to Foxx, who at that point was a stand-up comic and singer who had some success with his own TV show, running for three years, but had little movie experience. Stone was keen for him to join the project, but the initial meeting could have gone better to say the least.
Foxx told Oprah, “Oliver Stone…when he met me, he said, ‘You stink, you’re terrible. You can’t act at all’. I was like, ‘What?’ It was because I came from TV. And everything was loud in TV… And as I walked out of [Stone’s] office from my first audition, he wrote, and made me hear what he was saying, ‘Jamie Foxx: Slave to television’.”
Stone did qualify his pretty outlandish statement by giving the young actor some encouragement however, as Foxx added, “He said, ‘I want to give you the lead part, but we’ve got to work on you, because you stink'”.
Whatever Foxx did in the subsequent weeks worked, and he was given the part of Willie ‘Steamin’ Beamen, the third-string quarterback who gets given a shot at stardom and grabs it only for it all to go to his head in a big way. Any Given Sunday was a moderate hit on release in 1999, doubling its $55million budget, but reviews were mixed despite a cast featuring not just Pacino but Cameron Diaz and Randy Quaid too.
The experience with Stone on the movie certainly didn’t do Foxx’s career any harm, though. Within two years, he had appeared in a major role in Smith’s boxing biopic Ali, directed by Michael Mann, which picked up a couple of Oscar nominations, and three years after that, he had the kind of year which has rarely been replicated by an actor before or since.
2004 saw him star in both Mann’s Collateral with Tom Cruise and the musical bio Ray, getting Oscar-nominated for both movies in the same year and winning ‘Best Actor’ for the latter. You can imagine he might have given Stone a quick wink as he walked by with the trophy.
