To almost an entire nation over in the USA, John Goodman will always be known as Roseanne’s husband in that famous 1980s sitcom that ran for almost ten years, Goodman playing the jeans-wearing, football loving, usually frustrated suburban dad that everyone could relate to. But over here we know him better as one of the finest character actors of recent years.
A frequent Coen brothers collaborator, Goodman has put in some amazingly powerful shifts in some of the most inventive films over the last 30 years – proving he is far, far more than just someone who can walk through a door to a living room to canned laughter and complain about a lack of action in the bedroom.
An American football prospect who had to pack it in due to injury, Goodman instead studied theatre at university and headed to New York City for a crack at getting into movies and TV thanks to a loan from his brother. He picked up some voice-over work before a long-running part in a Broadway musical, and a couple of small film roles arrived, including sex comedy Revenge of the Nerds in 1984.
It was undoubtedly Roseanne that thrust him into the spotlight four years later, the sitcom that in just a year became the number one show in America. A year before that, however, he had worked with the Coen brothers for the first time on the Nicolas Cage movie Raising Arizona, and then showed he could mix it with the best alongside Al Pacino on 1989’s Sea of Love.
He had an up and down 1990s, with the likes of King Ralph, Arachnophobia and the inexplicably popular Flintstones movie in ‘94 but it was slacker comedy The Big Lebowski where he really started to show his quality. Launching thousands of fancy dress imitations with his character Walter Sobchak, the movie was a huge hit for the Coen Brothers and Goodman was one of the major reasons why.
Over the next few years, Goodman did the occasional movie role and a lot of voice-over work for animations, notably as the enormous blue fuzzy monster Sully in Monsters Inc. and the follow-up Monsters University for Pixar. Acclaim followed for his work in the TV series Treme in 2010 before he appeared with Ben Affleck in the Oscar-winning Argo in 2012.
A superb performance in the Coen Brothers masterpiece Inside Llewyn Davis followed before he lined up alongside Matt Damon and Bill Murray in the George Clooney-written and directed WW2 treasure hunt movie The Monuments Men in 2014.
Despite his memorable work with the Coens and the range of films he’s appeared in, he perhaps surprisingly harks back to his early days on stage when asked about his favourite role. He told Garden & Gun: “I’m going to sound like an egomaniac, but yes [he puts on a pretentious British accent], I prefer Shakespeare. But it’s true. I think my favorite role was Falstaff at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. I was too young to completely appreciate it, but it felt good.”
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 an as yet untitled movie from The Revenant and Birdman director Alejandro G. Iñárritu.
