 |
LOS ANGELES -- Funny thing, but none of Jamie Foxx's last seven movies have been comedies -- dating back to his Oscar-winning turn in 2204 opposite Tom Cruise in Collateral.
And that's been by design.
"I'm gonna tell you what," says the actor, who first became famous on the Wayans brothers' sketch series In Living Color, "it pulls at your comedic soul, you'll watch a Rush Hour or (Adam) Sandler or (Ben) Stiller or (Eddie) Murphy, and you just go 'Man!' "
But post-Oscar, he was told going for laughs was no way to be taken seriously. "I mean, I want to do everything. I want to do the Rush Hours. But I have a great team with agents and managers who say, 'Foxx, you might not be able to come back to what you've built.' "
Serious movies, of course, aren't as sure a bet at the box office as are comedies. Case in point: Jarhead, the complicated tale of stir-crazy Marines waiting for action in the first Gulf War -- a fairly well-received film that died at the box office. Better results are expected for the much more action-oriented war-on-terror flick The Kingdom, which opens today.
"When you work with a Michael Mann and a Peter Berg (producer and director of The Kingdom), the commercial success is not the first thing you think about. It's about doing a piece that when you look back on it, you can be happy about it. I mean, look at Al Pacino. We did this American Cinematheque Award thing where we honoured him, and I remember thinking that when you look at his body of work, there are not a lot of commercial successes. But that doesn't matter."
He's learned to take pleasure where he can get it in his new line of work. In The Kingdom -- where he plays the leader of an FBI team hunting down terrorists in Saudi Arabia -- "there was the physicality of going around blowing up stuff. That's the fun part, what you dreamt about when you were a kid. 'Man, I wanna blow stuff up and be a hero and save the day.' "
And his comedy jones is served on tour (he just finished a six-month comedy/music tour that brought him to Toronto's Sony Centre), and of late, on satellite radio.
"Sirius radio gave me a chance to have my own comedy station. So if you ever want to hear how it's goin' down with the jokes, hit me on Sirius 106 in the Foxxhole and we give it to you good over there. And don't write in, 'cause it gets bad sometimes."