The rise and fall of Cuba Gooding Jr
Winning an Academy Award in 1997 did Cuba Gooding Jr no good, and, as he tells Sheila Johnston, he thinks he knows why
Published: 11 May 2007
Missed opportunities: Cuba Gooding Jr
Ten years ago, Cuba Gooding Jr was king of the world. Critics loved him; so did audiences and his peers. He had earned respect as a rebellious teen in the 1991 drama Boyz N The Hood. And, in 1997, he won the Oscar for best supporting actor, for his role in Jerry Maguire as the lovable, loud-mouthed football star whose catchphrase was "Show me the money!". It was a line that would come back to haunt him.
Gooding's acceptance speech that night went down in Oscar history. He bounced crazily around the stage, shouting, "Everybody who's involved with this, I love you, I love you!", until the orchestra cut him off. Shortly afterwards, according to legend, his statuette received a dent in the head when he dropped it at a party. "Oh, that's a rumour that I can't clarify," he says now, laughing naughtily.
Exuberant and mouthy, the actor has charm to burn. He calls me "lady" and "darling", talks with endearing humour, and seems happy to say whatever pops into his head. But, although he mentions his Academy Award some half-dozen times during the conversation, you sense, under the bravado, an edge of disappointment: the realisation, perhaps, that opportunities have passed him by.
Today, there's also a big dent in Gooding's reputation. Over the past decade, he has stumbled from lamentable comedies, such as Boat Trip and Snow Dogs, to schmaltzy, would-be prestigious films such as Radio, in which he played a mentally retarded man rejected by his community. His performances weren't bad, but the movies often were.
We meet at the San Sebastian Film Festival, where Gooding is attempting to rally with Shadowboxer, a florid, borderline kitsch, not unenjoyable pulp thriller. He plays a troubled hitman embroiled in a semi-incestuous relationship with his stepmother, also a contract killer who is dying of cancer. Directed by Lee Daniels, who previously produced several feted independent films including Monster's Ball and The Woodsman, Shadowboxer boasts the oddest of romantic couples: Gooding, 39, and Helen Mirren, 61, a long way away here from Queen mode. Gooding had been offered a secondary role, but was switched to the lead two days before shooting began, when Ryan Phillippe pulled out. He hadn't met Mirren before. "We'd had not one day of rehearsal, not one conversation, until the scene with me standing naked in the bushes and her smoking. It was all a blur, that day," he recalls.
Gooding and Mirren have two robust sex scenes: one in which he performs a striptease, and a second in which they make love alfresco. "They are polar opposites, but they were real pros and got along just smashingly," Daniels recalls. "We shot those sequences first. I thought they would be nervous, but I was more nervous than either of them.
"I never realised how much full-frontal nudity there was until I saw the finished movie. I thought, 'Oh, my God, this is going to be X-rated!'. I had to tame it down a lot." The result went "way beyond conventional Hollywood sex", according to The New York Times. "I haven't seen a black man and a white woman make love like this in an American movie since [...] Bad Company in 1995," continued the critic Stephen Holden.
But Daniels was to discover that producing an Oscar-winning film and directing one are very different matters. After brief appearances at a handful of festivals, Shadowboxer went straight to DVD almost everywhere, including the UK, where it has just been released with an 18 rating.
Gooding is not the first Oscar laureate to see his career collapse under him. But what, specifically, went wrong for him? Some believe he took his Jerry Maguire mantra too much to heart. "I thought money was important," he admits. "I said that I needed to earn $20m a picture for the studios to respect me. At the time, it made sense, but now I realise it's about connecting with an audience."
He thinks that his race put him at a disadvantage. "The system faltered and didn't quite know where to put me after the Academy Award," he says. However, Daniels, who is also black, thinks Gooding protests too much: "I'm reading Sidney Poitier's autobiography, and thinking how far we have come since then," the director-producer says. "It makes me feel embarrassed to complain or even to mention the 'race' word."
Daniels blames Gooding's downfall on his Oscar speech. "He was very excited, justifiably so, but his energy can be perceived incorrectly, in particular by African-Americans. They found it over-the-top." Daniels pauses, looking for the right words. "A little too... white. If you saw Bamboozled, you'll understand what I mean." In Spike Lee's withering satire of 2000, a black TV director makes a minstrel show that lampoons - but also celebrates - racist stereotypes. The show wins an award, and the director's speech is a cruel copy of Gooding's. The implication is that the character and his real-life counterpart are Uncle Tom clowns pandering to a white media establishment.
"Spike Lee and I don't really know each other," the actor comments. "I just know the shit he says about me. After I won the Academy Award, he offered me The Best Man." Gooding was peeved that this was to be directed by Lee's brother, Malcolm, rather than by Spike himself. "I can only assume that he has no desire to work with me," he says.
He concedes that, attempting to compete with Will Smith, he was "sucked in to doing comedies". In these, he feels, "I'm not good because I'm focused on trying to please and making the jokes work. I don't do comedies any more, I do characters."
On the set of Shadowboxer, Gooding learnt that Daniels had wanted him for The Woodsman, an acclaimed film about a paedophile, which earned huge kudos for Kevin Bacon, who took the role. "I confronted my manager," Gooding says. "And he said, 'I felt you shouldn't be doing that paedophile movie'. He didn't even send me the script."
One assumes that the actor is a good deal more hands-on these days. He rolls his eyes and heaves a big, comically theatrical sigh. "Lady, in ways you can't comprehend. At one point, I had a business manager, a lawyer, an agent, a manager, a publicist, two assistants and a producing partner." He has fired his agents repeatedly, and now has an entourage of three, who have to consult him on everything. "I am the CEO of Cuba Gooding Jr, Inc. No one knows more about Cuba Gooding Jr, except perhaps my wife." (He has been married for 13 years to Sara Kapfer, a schoolteacher, with whom he has three children.)
So far, Gooding's comeback is proving an uphill struggle. Recently, he made Endgame, a political thriller, with which he's not happy. "It's such a long story, darling. If this was a bar and a beer, I'd go into detail," he says, with a confidential air. Nor has he forsworn goofy comedies: he played second banana to Eddie Murphy in Norbit, and will star in a sequel to Murphy's Daddy Day Care. But things might yet look up for Cuba Gooding Jr, later this year. In Ridley Scott's Seventies crime drama American Gangster, Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe star, but Gooding has a good supporting turn as a pimp who turns police informant. "God's will has been done in my career," says Gooding. "I wouldn't be at the place I'm at as an artist without these experiences."
Daniels is positive, too: "I'm very optimistic about Cuba because no one can take away his talent."
'Shadowboxer' is out now on DVD
