“I blew it”: When Jamie Foxx botched the biggest moment of his career
Many of us have had opportunities in life that we wish we could have taken, but didn’t.
Maybe you had a chance at a job that you failed to get because you said you liked the interviewer’s eyes, or perhaps you didn’t get made head boy at school because you erroneously said one of the teachers was stealing stuff, to pick two examples entirely at random. But if you’re a Hollywood star, like Jamie Foxx, the stakes are much higher.
That’s because a failed audition can cost not just career prospects, but millions and millions of dollars, not least the chance at Oscars or Golden Globes glory if the film in question goes on to be a hit, rather like the 1996 Cameron Crowe classic Jerry Maguire. That movie, starring Tom Cruise, was one of the biggest hits of the mid-1990s, a romantic comedy drama telling the story of a money-hungry sports agent and his new sports star client, and would go on to scoop five Academy Award nominations.
One of those nominations was turned into a win, with Cuba Gooding Jr taking home the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ prize for a once-in-a-lifetime performance. But had things gone differently, it could well have been Foxx who took on that role – had he not messed up the audition that is.
Foxx told Playboy magazine: “I blew it, man. Maybe I wasn’t ready. Tom was just too famous, and I was too young. I was a stand-up comedian, and I just fucked it up. I was reading all loud and stuff, and Tom was very quiet. So I read my lines, and then he paused for a long time… So I said: ‘Tom, it’s your line.’ And he looked at me and said: ‘I know. I got it.'”
At least, however, the process that day wasn’t an entirely wasted one. Foxx recalled that Cruise was laughing at his jokes between readings and remembered him, something that paid off when the pair were finally cast together on the 2004 action thriller Collateral, directed by Heat’s Michael Mann.
That film proved to be another major hit, almost on the same scale as Jerry Maguire, and brought in $220million at the box office against a budget of just over $60m. It also landed Foxx an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ in what was a year for the ages for the Texan, coming in the same ceremony that he would win the ‘Best Actor’ Oscar for the musical biopic Ray.
Foxx was undeniably at the peak of his career at that point – he also had two number one singles and a number one album in 2005 with Unpredictable, which went double platinum, and was rewarded with four Grammy award nominations the following year.
He then went on to book a number of big-budget blockbusters with eight-figure paydays, including the Miami Vice reboot with Colin Farrell and 2006’s Dreamgirls opposite Beyoncé. Six years later, he received huge acclaim for his work on Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, in which he played the lead role as a freed slave battling to save his wife.
Foxx is currently reportedly working on a remake of Sam Peckinpah’s bloody western The Wild Bunch in addition to the Mike Tyson biographical TV series.
