The two “incredible” actors that blew John Goodman’s mind: “I can’t believe they did that”
Although he was in the classic sitcom Roseanne for some 30 years on and off, John Goodman is probably now better known not just as the voice of Sully from Monsters Inc, but also as a character actor that almost always gives you a stamp of quality, letting you know the movie you’ve just turned on is going to be worth watching.
A familiar face in living rooms all over America in the 1980s, Goodman, who is now 73, matured into a genuine movie star, often working under the geniuses that are the Coen brothers, and stealing films completely, an example being his sunglasses-rocking Vietnam vet in 1997’s The Big Lebowski.
Since the turn of the century, he’s been in several films that might not qualify as blockbusters, but certainly count as movies that people should check out if they missed them the first time around. Some of those would include two superb dramas he made in 2012, Flight and Argo, starring Denzel Washington and Ben Affleck, respectively, two giants of modern cinema, and he proved more than capable of carrying a movie himself with the terrifically creepy 10 Cloverfield Lane with Mary Elizabeth Wansted, telling the tale of a man keeping a car crash victim in an underground bunker after convincing her the air above ground is too toxic to breathe.
Back in 2011, Goodman appeared in The Artist, a brave move given it was not just a foreign production but also done in the style of old silent films, revolving around the story of a movie star falling for a dancer in the late 1920s, and it proved to be a masterstroke of a gamble for the man.
It swept the board when awards season came around, picking up ten Oscars and winning five, including the coveted ‘Best Picture’, becoming the first black and white movie to do so since Jack Lemmon’s The Apartment in 1960, and the first silent film since the very first Academy Awards in 1929.
Appearing in the film gave Goodman a newfound appreciation of the actors in silent movies of the era portrayed, as he told 24 Frames, “Yeah. The older I get, the more I appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into what we do. Watching those guys creating, especially like Buster Keaton, [Charlie] Chaplin, I can’t believe that they did the stuff they do. Incredible skills went into it.”
Both Keaton and Chaplin were pioneers of cinema who worked not just in silent movies but also made huge waves when the change to audio was brought in, with Chaplin writing and directing films as influential as The Great Dictator in 1940, and Keaton making cameos in the likes of 1950’s Sunset Boulevard. In the 1920s, the pair were contemporaries and professional rivals, sometimes jealous of the other’s success and talent; Chaplin was famous first, but Keaton eventually surpassed him in terms of box office success, spurring each other on to eventually appear together onscreen in a 1952 movie called The End.
Goodman added, “What I’m learning to appreciate now is like my character [in The Artist], these were really tough. They wanted to entertain people and wanted to put butts in the seats. To do that, they had to wrestle all kinds of stuff but ultimately have a gut feeling about what looked good up there and what people wanted to see.”
Goodman will soon be seen with Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston in Chili Finger, the story of a woman who finds a human finger in her food and tries to blackmail the restaurant, plus in an yet-untitled movie from The Revenant and Birdman director Alejandro G Iñárritu, only further strengthening his roster.
