The movie John Goodman will always remember as “the most fun I ever had” on set
There are two versions of John Goodman when you think about it, and both of them seem like they would be a fun time to hang out with.
There’s 1980s John Goodman, the American football shirt-wearing, trucker hat-sporting, Roseanne-starring hulk of a man, the one who played the father in the live-action Flintstones movie and seemed like he would exist solely on a diet of hot dogs and cans of Miller Light. Then there’s the much, much thinner, more recent John Goodman, the serious actor who brings a sense of authority to brilliant movies like Inside Llewyn Davis and 10 Cloverfield Lane.
Goodman has now been around so long that he has played most kinds of roles in most kinds of movies; sci-fi, musicals, Smurfs, the Hangover comedies, and 2026 could well be another big year for him as he lines up alongside Tom Cruise for Digger, the latest film from Oscars favourite Alejandro González Iñárritu, plus the curious sounding Chili Finger with Bryan Cranston about a lawyer who finds a human finger in her food and tries to blackmail the restaurant.
If the former film manages to get Goodman in the running for top industry awards, then it will be well deserved, because that’s an area that he has been strangely overlooked in over the years, with the actor only having picked up an Emmy and one Golden Globe despite a career that has so far spanned some 44 years.
One film that you might have thought could have collected some honours, if just for the calibre of the cast alone, was 2014’s The Monuments Men, the George Clooney-directed war movie that told the story of the real-life team sent into Nazi Germany in WW2 in order to save priceless art that Hitler had stuffed away inside enormous castles.
The ensemble cast was quite ridiculous really: Cate Blanchett, Clooney, Matt Damon, Goodman, Bill Murray, and despite a sizable budget (most of which probably went on actor’s salaries) the film was a moderate success, bringing in $150m at the box office. Critics weren’t blown away, however, with the film getting mixed reviews, but Goodman certainly looks back on the experience of making it more than fondly.
He told Garden & Gun shortly after wrapping on the film: “It’s pretty much the most fun I ever had making a movie”.
Addoing, “George is so organized and he knows exactly what he wants. So he gets set up and boom, we get done, wait for another setup, and sit around and swap lies and tell stories and just generally laugh our asses off.”
One actor in particular proved to be a lot of fun for Goodman to hang around with; asked if Bill Murray was as funny in person as he is in movies, Goodman responded: “Funnier. And he’s so generous. He’d go up and hug everybody, from the people that made the coffee to the camera guys.”
Aside from the two big films he has coming up, Goodman continues to be linked with a return to his Pixar days as fans clamour for a Monsters Inc 3 to be made. He did reprise his role as the big fuzzy blue yeti thing Sully in a short last year called Monsters Funday Football; however, there are no concrete plans for a third instalment proper as yet, despite it already being 13 years since Monsters University.
