Eric Marlon Bishop recalls his years spent as quarterback of his high school football team in small-town Terrell, Texas, with fondness. At the same time, however, he admits he couldn’t wait to leave football and the Lone Star State as far behind as possible after graduation.
“In Texas, football is considered a holy tradition, not just a sport,” says the actor, singer and comedian who would legally change his name to Jamie Foxx. “There was so much pressure put on us at times that things just got crazy. I remember this one championship game where I avoided an interception, and I threw the ball out of bounds. Right afterwards, I heard the preacher of my church booing me from the stands. That’s when I decided I needed to get out.”
The fact that he played piano and sang in the choir at the New Hope Baptist Church earned Foxx a scholarship to a small liberal arts college in San Diego, where he majored in music.
“Football was fun and all, but I was going to be a musician,” Foxx says during a recent L.A. interview. “As far as I was concerned, my days on the gridiron were over. I was going to sing and play piano for a living.”
Little did he know that a visit to Los Angeles would change the course of his life forever. While visiting an L.A. comedy club on his 21st birthday, Foxx took to the stage on a dare from a friend and brought the house down with an impromptu routine. He even scored a regular stand-up gig in the process.
That job led to a spot on the popular early-’90s sketch-com TV show In Living Color, which led to his own comedy series, The Jamie Foxx Show, in the late ’90s.
But Foxx had bigger aspirations.
“I wanted to get into movies in a big way,” he says. “I mean, I had gotten roles in films like Booty Call, but I wanted to do something major. I wanted to leave my mark in films. But I couldn’t seem to make it happen for the longest time.”
Fast-forward nearly a decade. After several sidekick roles (The Great White Hype), B-movies (Date From Hell), failed auditions (Cuba Gooding Jr.’s role in Jerry Maguire) and near-hits (Any Given Sunday), Foxx walked onto the stage of the Kodak Theatre to accept the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Ray, a bio-pic about legendary singer/songwriter Ray Charles. That same year Foxx earned a Supporting Actor nomination for his part as a hijacked cabbie in Collateral, making him the first African-American actor to be nominated in two categories in the same year. For Eric Marlon Bishop, 2005 will always be considered his year of living miraculously.
With Oscar gold on his résumé, Foxx knew a lot of closed doors were about to open.
“Very quickly, I realized the Oscar was good for getting me into those projects that I really want to be a part of,” he says. “Before I won it, I used to go up to the office and go, ‘I want to do those scripts back there — the good ones.’ They’d go, ‘You can’t have those scripts.’ I said, ‘Why? I think that I can do a great job.’ Now they’ll offer me those roles, or I can ask to be a part of it.”
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Jamie Foxx in The Kingdom
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One of the projects Foxx asked to be a part of was The Kingdom, a thriller about a terrorist bombing at an American facility in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that bears striking similarities to the real 2003 bombing that took place in Riyadh. The film was produced by Foxx’s director from Collateral and Miami Vice, Michael Mann, and helmed by actor/director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights).
“As an actor, you always have to be aware of the type of movie you make, but you can’t be afraid to do a movie that some people might consider risky,” says Foxx. “If you find a script that really excites you, the only thing that you have to do is to get into character and let it be what it is. And if it’s unforgiving, let that be what it is too. Whatever it is, ride with that, because when you look back on your body of work, that’s what you’re going to enjoy, the fact that you can go into a character and disappear in a great story.”
Foxx plays FBI Special Agent Ronald Fleury, who’s ordered to assemble a team of the bureau’s elite agents — Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner), Adam Leavitt (Jason Bateman) and Grant Sykes (Chris Cooper) — to hunt down the terrorist cell that bombed the compound. |
But the team’s job turns out to be harder than they’d hoped. The local Saudi authorities are suspicious of Westerners and less than helpful, the heat is almost unbearable, and they’re crippled by political protocol, which appears to be dangerously corrupt. They also doubt the trustworthiness of their Saudi counterparts, informants, and before they know it — each other. But after finding an ally (Ashraf Barhom) in the Saudi Police, the tide begins to turn, and they find themselves getting closer to finding that cell.
Foxx insists The Kingdom is not meant as an anti- or pro-war statement about America’s current war. Having spent time with many members of the military doing research for Jarhead, his 2005 movie about the first Gulf War, he certainly understands the “win at all costs” mentality concerning the conflict.
“For a lot of the guys I met, this war is like their Super Bowl,” Foxx explains. “To many of them, it is their Oscar or Stanley Cup when they can come back and say, ‘I went out there and I protected you.’”
Even though he started out as a comedian, Foxx doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to return to big-screen comedies. After doing seven serious movies in a row, the actor is currently considering roles in bio-pics about R&B singer Marvin Gaye and troubled boxer Mike Tyson.
“To be honest, doing dramatic films are easier for me because you just play what is written on the page,” Foxx explains. “But with comedy, you have to wait a year until the movie opens up to find out if you’re funny. And what’s considered funny changes fast and in different ways within the African-American and white communities. A year later, a black guy can see your movie and go, ‘When did he turn so corny? That’s sooo corny, man.’ But the white dude could be going, ‘He’s so funny. He’s one hip, funny black fella.’ With dramatic movies, if it’s sad, everybody cries. It doesn’t matter what colour you are.”
Earl Dittman is a Houston-based entertainment writer.