NEW YORK CITY -- Plenty of actors want to become so adept at a role that they could do it with their eyes closed. Most don't mean that literally.
Then there's Jamie Foxx. To portray blind soul-music pioneer Ray Charles in the new biopic Ray, Foxx went to extreme lengths -- including spending 14-hour shooting days with his eyes sealed shut behind prosthetics.
Crazy? Not to Foxx.
"You had to," insists the 36-year-old actor, relaxing in a penthouse suite in a Manhattan hotel. "There was no other way to do it.
"In this role, Ray Charles, you're not going to be able to get that real man otherwise. You're not going to experience things the way he experienced them. To do it any other way would be cheating."
Not that there weren't times when it would have been nice.
"There were things that would happen to me on that set with those eyes glued -- people forgetting that I can't see and walking me into a wall. Or they would call lunch and leave me sitting at the piano," he laughs. "It would be like, 'Where's Foxx?' "
He doesn't have that problem anymore. Everybody knows where Foxx is. And who he is. He works with Tom Cruise. He parties with P. Diddy. He's even begun to attract the attention of supermarket tabloids, a confirmation of fame if there ever was one (see sidebar).
Much of that attention stems from two words: Collateral and Ray. The former was the film he co-starred in earlier this year, playing a cabbie forced to chauffeur hit man Cruise around L.A. The role earned Foxx the best reviews of his career.
By next Friday, when Ray opens, they'll be his second-best reviews. In an uncanny and stirring performance that is generating Oscar buzz, Foxx seems to channel Charles, replicating everything from his twitchy mannerisms and wobbling head to his dusty stutter and piano technique.
Foxx, a natural mimic and gifted musician, says impersonating Brother Ray wasn't the problem -- it was convincing people he actually was Charles.
"I had done Ray Charles impersonations before, so I knew that I could kinda get into that head space. But it's the challenge of, can you really make people believe it? When you look at biopics, it's like, 'That person looks kinda like it, but ... ' So it was like, can you go beyond that to where people are gonna go, 'Wow, I'm not seeing Jamie Foxx.' "
Give him credit for starting with the very toughest critic -- the mercurial Charles.
"I met Ray and he was like, 'Oh, let me check these fingers out. Oh, you got strong fingers, oh yeah,' " says Foxx, mimicking Charles. "So then we sit down at dual pianos -- he's playing one piano, I'm playing another. And we're singing the blues. He says, 'If you can sing the blues, Jamie, you can do anything.' "
Make that almost anything. "He goes into (avant garde be-bop pianist) Thelonious Monk. And it's like riding the mechanical bull if you've had too many drinks -- you just fly all the way out into the bar," Foxx laughs. "I hit a wrong note. And he stopped and said, 'Now why the hell did you do that?' And he wasn't laughing. He said, 'The notes are right underneath your fingers; you just have to take time out to find them, young man.'
"And then I started listening to him. His music is his harmony; if it's off, his whole life is off. So I used that as a metaphor through the movie -- our whole life is notes underneath our fingers, we just gotta figure out which notes we wanna play. I said, 'OK, I'm gonna play the right Ray Charles notes.' "
But first, he still had to play the right Monk notes.
"After I got the Thelonious Monk riff, he was like, 'There it is, that's what I'm talking about.' When I finally got it, he jumped up and he slapped his thighs and he said, 'The kid's got it,' and he walked out. That's when I knew I had the role."
That was the beginning. To achieve the verisimilitude he sought, Foxx spent months preparing. He dropped 30 pounds from his athletic build to mirror Charles' slight, drug-ravaged physique. He not only learned to play hits like What'd I Say, Georgia on My Mind and I've Got a Woman, he learned to do it while lip-synching to Charles' original vocals. And he spent time with the legend himself, in and out of the spotlight.
"When you're not on, that's the realness of a person -- how he orders his food, how he talks to his kids, how he gets angry," says Foxx, who found himself marvelling at Charles' sense of direction. "He would walk around with no cane, no dog -- it was as if he could see. It was almost like, is he tricking us? He always knew exactly where he was going."
Foxx seems to have equally unerring instincts. Born Eric Marlon Bishop in Terrell, Tex., he was raised by his adoptive grandmother. After attending university on a classical-piano scholarship, he made his way to L.A. to be "the next Lionel Richie." When that didn't pan out, he turned to comedy, landing on In Living Color from 1991 - '94. After a few seasons on his own sitcom and a few forgettable urban comedies like Booty Call, Foxx stood out from the crowd as a cocky quarterback in Oliver Stone's 1999 gridiron flick Any Given Sunday. That led to a role in 2001's Ali as the champ's poetic sidekick Bundini Brown -- which prompted director Michael Mann to use him again in Collateral, the role that made him a bona fide star.
But it's Ray that will likely make him an Oscar nominee. Following Charles from his bleak, dirt-poor childhood (when he watched his brother drown at age five and lost his sight a year later) through the hardships of his early career (when he faced racial barriers, battled crooked managers and became hooked on heroin) and into the crucible of fame (when he struggled to blaze new musical paths while maintaining his addiction along with a string of mistresses), the film is a gritty, unflinching portrait of a tortured but brilliant artist. And Foxx's nuanced, skillful work is already being lauded by critics. Even that toughest critic -- Charles, who insisted director Taylor Hackford not shy away from the dark times of his life -- gave the film a thumbs-up before he died of liver disease in June.
Next up for Foxx is American Beauty director Sam Mendes' Jarhead, based on the story of a '90s Gulf War veteran. He's also in talks to team with Colin Farrell in the Mann-directed film adaptation of '80s cop-kitsch classic Miami Vice. And he's just signed an album deal with Clive Davis's J Records.
Meanwhile, he's also trying to enjoy the roller-coaster of fame. He's earned a reputation as a major party animal -- he has called himself "the black Hugh Hefner" -- though he makes his lifestyle sound far more existential.
"My parties are for a purpose," he claims. "I bring together all my friends that are celebrities that I've looked up to. You have to, I believe, enjoy every aspect of this life. And when you can get together and share with folks like that -- Kevin Spacey and Denzel Washington, Will Smith and Eddie Murphy, Chris Tucker -- and have them come and dance and sit around and talk, it's a great experience. It's beautiful. And to me that's what parties are for. I'm not throwing a party just to say, 'Hey man, we wild.' We're doing it so we can enrich ourselves and say, 'Man, we shared a moment.' "
But he knows the party can't last forever.
"This is the Cinderella time right now," he confirms. "This is when everybody is, 'Oh we love you.' But it's like flying out of Los Angeles. At first it's pretty and everything is nice. And then the pilot says, 'Uh, we're gonna have a little weather over Detroit.' So I know we're coming up to some turbulence."
These days, Foxx obviously has his eyes wide open.
TABLOIDS ARE PAGING JAMIE FOXX
Want proof that Jamie Foxx is playing in the big leagues? Look no further than your local supermarket checkout.
Weeks before the opening of his new picture Ray, some alleged pictures of a very different sort earned Foxx the sort of tabloid-press attention that only the truly famous receive.
According to the story that began making the rounds earlier this month, a construction worker claims to have found a box in the trash outside Foxx's Las Vegas home containing nearly 100 photos of the actor engaged in sexual activity. The man reportedly said he offered to return the photos to Foxx, but after several men barged into his home and assaulted him, he filed a battery complaint with Las Vegas police and hired an agent to help him sell the photos to the tabloids.
One U.S. newspaper that viewed some of the photos said they appear to be authentic, though others have questioned the construction worker's claim of finding them in the garbage. Representatives of Foxx have been quoted as saying the photos are several years old, private and stolen property.
But Foxx told The Sun the whole tale is news to him -- and a fabrication.
"I live on the West Coast, and I hadn't even heard about it," he says. "I didn't know anything about it until I got here to New York."
"Fame generates it. That's when you know you made it, when they just make up anything. During Collateral, I would hang out with Tom Cruise and I would read stories about him that are absolutely not true. Just like this is not true -- not even close.
"There's nothing you can do. The only thing you can do is pursue that art. You can't fight all the rest of that stuff."
In the long run, though, he doesn't worry it will hurt him professionally.
"My career has never been that kind of a career that hung on stories in papers."
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