At 74, John Goodman Admits What He Regretted Most

At 74, John Goodman Admits What He Regretted Most 

He crashed for two weeks, not publicly, just quietly, the way a large man crashes when something he loved gets taken away before he was ready. The Roseanne revival had drawn 27 million viewers in a single night, and then, within hours of a tweet, it was gone. John Goodman told Jimmy Kimmel about the two weeks without performance, the way you describe a thing you’ve had enough distance to finally say out loud.

 I thought, “Okay, I’d be a big boy. I’d handle this.” And I just crashed. At 74, John Goodman has said what he regretted most, not the drinking years, not the roles he passed on, something quieter than all of that and more complicated. John Stephen Goodman was born June 20th, 1952, the second son of Leslie and Virginia Goodman.

 His father was gone before he was old enough to form a memory of him. Virginia worked as a waitress, then a saleswoman, and raised three children on what that pays. He was heavy early, and the weight made school harder than it needed to be. Bullies took note. He took note of the bullies taking note. He found the Boy Scouts and stayed until ninth grade because the structure gave him somewhere to belong.

 He read comics, DC first, then Marvel. And at home, his older brother introduced him to comedy records and bebop music, which together gave him a sense of rhythm he would carry into everything he ever did. At Afton High School, football found him. He was an offensive guard and defensive tackle, and good enough that Southwest Missouri State University offered him a scholarship.

 In the fall of 1970, he arrived on campus with a plan. Then he tore his ACL in his first year, and the plan was finished. He wandered into the drama department not knowing what else to do. He auditioned for a play not expecting much. He got the part. He has used the word smitten to describe standing on a stage for the first time, which is not the word you’d expect from a man of his size, and is precisely right.

 He found Kathleen Turner there and Tess Harper, people who shared what he had just discovered. He stopped looking for another plan. In August 1975, he moved to New York with a theater degree, a small loan from his brother, and an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen at the time when the name still meant something. He waited tables. He worked one night as a club called Adam’s Apple, received instruction from a tough German head bouncer on handling unruly customers, and left after that single night without going back.

 He took every part he could find off Broadway, dinner theater in Ohio, a production of 1776 in Miami that gave him experience and connections, but not yet a career. He kept moving. The first film role came in 1983, a small part in Eddie Macon’s Run that nobody noticed. Then True Stories in 1986, David Byrne’s strange and gentle portrait of small-town Texas in which Goodman played Louis Fine, a sweet, lonely man advertising for a wife on local television.

 He has said about that film that it was the first lead he had ever gotten, that he [clears throat] liked what Byrne was trying to say, that it felt very gentle. He sang in it. He was genuinely happy doing it. The following year came the Coen brothers, which is where things started to permanently change. Raising Arizona in 1987 put him opposite Nicolas Cage as Gale Snoats, an escaped convict of complete conviction and approximately two-digit intelligence.

 The audition had been, by his own account, one of the best hours of his professional life. He and Joel and Ethan just goofed around. He didn’t care whether he got the role, and the looseness produced something better than any prepared performance could have. He has said the Coens’ dialogue only sounds improvised because of the luxury of rehearsing it until the words feel like yours.

 You can’t improve on what they write. You just have to let it do what it was designed to do. In March 1988, John Goodman was performing Anthony and Cleopatra in Los Angeles when an ABC talent scout walked into the theater. The network was urgently looking for a man to play Roseanne Barr’s on-screen husband. He walked into the audition, told Barr to scoot over.

 She told him to shut up. He sat down next to her, and everyone in the room knew immediately. He has described it as easy as falling out of bed. He was loose, didn’t think he was going to get the role, wasn’t managing the outcome, which was, across his career, consistently when he was at his best.

 What he didn’t know when he sat down next to Roseanne Barr that afternoon, was that she had wanted someone else for the part, Tom Arnold, her boyfriend at the time. The producers had insisted on an actor with professional experience. That quiet tension, the fact that the man playing her husband had not been her first choice, ran underneath the show’s entire nine-year run.

 Not loudly, not always visibly, but it was there. And John Goodman navigated it by being exactly what the role required, and exactly what Barr needed, a genuine collaborator who made her laugh, who stood with her when it mattered, and who did it all without making the alliance the story. Roseanne premiered October 18th, 1988, and by the end of its first season, it was the second most-watched show in America, averaging 36.

2 million viewers per episode. The numbers are extraordinary to contemplate now, in an era when the audience has fractured into a thousand separate streams. People watched Roseanne in the tens of millions because it was doing something that other sitcoms were not doing, showing working-class American life without either romanticizing it or looking down at it.

 The Conners argued about money the way people who don’t have enough of it actually argue, not with neat resolutions, but with the ongoing low-level friction of a life where the margin is narrow and keeps getting narrower. Dan Conner felt like someone you knew. John Goodman made him that way, which is harder than it looks, and which is why he received seven consecutive Emmy nominations for the role, and why the Academy’s failure to give him even one of them remains one of the more inexplicable streaks in television history. He won the Golden

Globe in 1993 and thanked his wife, then added that he’d like to thank his personal trainer, but didn’t have one. Exactly the right thing to say, exactly the right tone. Between seasons, the film work ran parallel and in a completely different register. Barton Fink with the Coens in 1991, Charlie Meadows, the jovial hotel neighbor, the man who turns out to be something else entirely.

 Goodman stayed in character between takes during the weeks when the character’s true nature was becoming clear, creating an atmosphere on set that unsettled his co-stars in ways that were not entirely manufactured. The final hotel fire sequence, Charlie walking through the flames with a shotgun, is one of the most extreme images the Coens have ever committed to film.

 Goodman commits to it totally. He always does. The drinking ran alongside all of it. He has been open about arriving on set hung over, about the drinking during the work day, about the fact that his performance didn’t obviously suffer, which is its own kind of trap because the absence of immediate consequences makes it harder to see the thing that’s actually happening.

 He got sober in 2007 and has described it plainly as saving his life, not with drama, just as a fact. Behind the scenes on Roseanne, the atmosphere was not always easy. In the second season, Barr circulated a list of people she planned to fire once she had more creative control. In 1989, she clashed so severely with the show’s creator, Matt Williams, that she threatened to leave if he stayed.

Goodman backed her, along with Laurie Metcalf and a young George Clooney. Williams departed. This was not a neutral act. You don’t take a side in a dispute that serious without understanding what it means, and Goodman understood it. His loyalty to Barr was real, built over years of making each other laugh in that particular way where there is always a danger, he has said with affection of her peeing herself.

 By the final season of the original run, he was earning $300,000 per episode, which made him one of the highest-paid actors on American television. The show ended in 1997 with 222 episodes and a cultural footprint that had fundamentally changed what a working-class family could look like on American primetime television.

 What Goodman has said about that ending is that it felt abrupt, not because the show wasn’t ready to conclude, but because nine years of showing up somewhere every week creates a kind of gravity that is hard to prepare for losing. He went back to what he had always done between seasons, finding the best work available, and doing it completely.

 The difference now was that there was no Roseanne to go back to when the film wrapped. That was a different kind of life, and he had to build it from scratch. >> The years between the end of Roseanne and the revival were not quiet. He appeared in O Brother, Where Art Thou? with the Coens in 2000, playing Big Dan Teague, a Bible salesman and clansman who meets a memorably violent end, which he has described with the particular relish of an actor recalling the specific pleasure of hitting Tim Blake Nelson upside the head with a tree branch while George Clooney watched with

a piece of chicken in his mouth. He appeared in Monster’s Ball in 2001, in Storytelling the same year, in Intolerable Cruelty with the Coens in 2003. The work was steady and serious and varied, but the gravitational center of his professional life, the show, the family, the table read on Monday morning, was gone and the freedom that came with its absence was real and also, by his own account, not entirely comfortable.

 The Big Lebowski in 1998 gave him Walter Sobchak, the Vietnam veteran, the bowler, the man who smashes a car with a crowbar while yelling about what happens when you aggress against someone in this particular fashion. Walter was based on real screenwriter John Milius and Goodman studied him carefully, absorbed his speech patterns and his specific energy, built the character from the outside in.

 The car smashing scene required 17 takes. A new car was destroyed each time. The production absorbed the cost without complaint because what Goodman was doing was worth it. Walter Sobchak has been quoted, imitated and celebrated ever since in ways that suggest the character hit something real in people. The specific pleasure of watching a man with absolutely no self-awareness be absolutely certain about everything.

Monster’s Inc. in 2001 took him somewhere else again. Over a hundred hours in the recording booth, sometimes 50 takes on a single line to find the right tone, building Sully from the voice out. He has said that when Pixar moved Billy Crystal into the booth with him and they were recording together, the energy just took off.

 He tried to hold on to whatever Billy was doing and build something with it. That collaborative aliveness, two performers finding something between them that neither could find alone, is what he has described with the most visible pleasure when he talks about that production. In 2011, he lost 60 pounds to play a studio executive in The Artist, the silent film, which required him to communicate entirely through physical expression, no voice, no line readings, just the body doing everything.

 He studied Roscoe Arbuckle and the physical grammar of that era. He prepared more deliberately than the brevity of the role might have suggested was necessary. That was always his method. The preparation is not proportional to the screen time. For Argo in 2012, he played real-life makeup artist and CIA operative John Chambers and discovered in the research process that Chambers had designed a prosthetic nose for him years earlier during the filming of The Babe, connecting Goodman through a piece of rubber and spirit gum to the actual man he was now being asked

to portray. For 10 Cloverfield Lane in 2016, he isolated himself in a bunker-like environment for weeks before production and delivered a performance as a doomsday prepper of quiet menace that left his co-star Mary Elizabeth Winstead genuinely scared during their scenes. Not performance scared, actually scared.

 He described the experience as getting to him after a while. The claustrophobia of the set, the bunker mentality, what a small enclosed space does to the people inside it over enough time. And then in 2018, the phone rang about Roseanne. The revival drew 18.2 million viewers on premiere night, 27 million after the delayed count, the highest-rated scripted broadcast in nearly four years.

 Goodman described returning to Dan Conner as putting on an old pair of shoes. The fit immediate, the character still there, exactly where he had left him two decades earlier. He and Barr made each other laugh the same way they always had. He stood next to her and felt the same thing he had felt in that audition room in 1988, something rare and specific and very difficult to replace.

 Then, May 29th, 2018, Barr posted a tweet comparing former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett to an ape. The condemnation was immediate and total. ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey canceled the show within hours, calling Barr’s comments abhorrent and inconsistent with the network’s values. The financial losses were estimated at $60 million in advertising revenue.

 Barr tried to walk it back, blamed the sleeping medication Ambien, said she had been posting strange things while on it. The drug manufacturer issued a statement noting that racism was not a known side effect. >> Goodman crashed. Two weeks. His wife got sick immediately after. He fell down the stairs.

 He told Kimmel about the accumulation of it. The show gone, his wife ill, himself falling down the stairs, with the specific dark humor of someone who has survived something absurd and emerged with a story that is terrible and also at sufficient distance almost funny in its relentlessness. He said he thought he’d be a big boy and handle it.

 He said he just crashed instead. What he said publicly about Barr in the weeks that followed was complicated and has stayed complicated. He told the Sunday Times he knew for a fact that she was not a racist. That statement landed poorly in a media environment with no appetite for nuance. He also said he was broken-hearted. He also said he thought, “Okay, it’s just show business. I’m going to let it go.

” These three things, the defense, the heartbreak, the attempted equanimity, existed in him simultaneously, which is what loyalty to a difficult person actually feels like from the inside. It’s not clean. It doesn’t resolve into a position. Barr renounced her financial stake in the show so the rest of the cast could keep working.

 The Conners launched October 16th, 2018. Goodman has said he couldn’t thank her enough for that. He also said filming the first episode without her was very weird. She was his buddy. They would sit there and make each other laugh and that specific thing was gone. The show found its audience and ran six seasons, closing its story in 2024.

 Dan Conner aged across those years in ways that felt true, slower, heavier with the accumulation of a life, still the man the audience had been watching since 1988. Goodman played it without sentimentality and without false notes, the way he had played everything. When a reporter asked him in 2023 whether he regretted defending Barr in the immediate aftermath, he said no.

 He said he remembered going to a junket where the interviews just turned into an attack on her and that made him very uncomfortable. He said he felt bad for her. He said, “I feel terrible about the whole thing. We had a great time and I love her. She’s just her own person.” When asked if he thought they would work together again, he said he didn’t know if she’d want to. He said he missed her.

He wished her well. That is the regret. Not a decision he made wrong, not a role he took or didn’t take, not the drinking years which he has made his peace with or the Emmy nominations that never converted or any of the other things a man his age might catalog as the places where things could have gone differently.

 The regret is simpler and harder than any of those. Something wonderful became something painful and the person at the center of both the wonderful and the painful was the same person, his friend and there is no version of the story where that resolves cleanly. You hold it. You carry it. You say, “I love her and she’s just her own person” and leave the rest of it alone.

At 74, what he admitted he regretted most was not a failure. It was a friendship and what happened to it and the fact that he still doesn’t know if it can be fully repaired. He said he missed her. That’s the whole answer. Some things you don’t get to fix. You just keep showing up the way he has always kept showing up and you hope that counts for something on the other side of whatever went wrong.

 He told Kimmel about the two weeks he spent crashing. He laughed about it, the way he laughs about things that aren’t funny yet, but will be. Then he said he pulled himself together. Then he went back to work. That is John Goodman. That has always been John Goodman. Thank you for watching, and don’t forget to subscribe to our channel. See you soon.