Moviegoers will see a new side of actor Cuba Gooding Jr. in Men of Honor, one that is in sharp contrast to the exuberantly emotional roles that came before.
Playing Carl Brashear, the first black man to achieve the highest rank in the U.S. navy's corps of deep-sea divers, Gooding is required to stay strong and be mostly silent. The word 'stoic' comes to mind.
"Here's a role where Cuba really doesn't say, verbally, a lot," director George Tillman Jr. said of the movie, which opens in theatres on Friday.
"I think this is one of his better roles because I think people are not expecting him to do anything like this. They're expecting Jerry Maguire. They're expecting a guy with a lot of external movements. I pulled him back in this film."
Nothing seemed capable of pulling Gooding back when I met with him in September. It was late afternoon, the second-last day of the Toronto International Film Festival. It was also the tail end of three packed days of playing meet-the-press for Gooding -- group interviews, the film's premiere, a press conference with co-star Robert DeNiro and dozens of interviews.
He might have been excused for feeling cranky or being overcome by sheer exhaustion, but Gooding was giddy and still good to go. His bounce-off-the-walls energy recalled perhaps the most indelible image we all have of him: Jumping joyfully around the stage as he collected his 1997 Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his Jerry Maguire role as flamboyant "Show me the money!" football player Rod Tidwell.
It's worth remembering that Gooding also once dropped trou' to demonstrate to an interviewer that he has no qualms about doing nudity. So he's a long way from shy.
Here, despite saying that in these three days on-duty he'd been asked every possible question except maybe "How big are the nose hairs on a rhinoceros?" he was still hungry for more.
"I feel grrrrr-eat," the Bronx-born 32-year-old declared, and proved it with close to an hour of wide-ranging and often raucous conversation.
He affectionately tattle-taled on his and wife Sara's rambunctious little boys, Spencer, 6, and Mason, 4.
"They're bad-assed bastards! Bad little, crazy sum'bitches!" he said, smiling and shaking his head. "When I walk in the door, the first thing they do is aim for my balls. You know what I mean? And I mean hard. They'll be tag-teaming like WWF. And it's my home. I mean, I paid good money for that house. They can't run me out of that house, and them little bastards try to every time I come home. Every time. They're little, tiny, strong little bastards ... They're my heart. They're just like I was when I was a kid and that's what makes me laugh ... Baaad. I saw those kids beat up a glass of water the other day!"
Inspirational story
He shared his pride in Men Of Honor, the true story of Brashear, a Kentucky sharecropper's son who joined the U.S. navy in 1948, just as it was desegregated, and eventually became its first black deep-sea diver, surviving the loss of a leg along the way. DeNiro plays Billy Sunday, a composite of the racist military superiors who tried to keep Brashear down and force him out, even if that meant putting him in harm's way.
"You know, there's been a lot of black parts, but you know the brother's got to be in prison to overcome racism or running from the law or something. Or he's got to be beat down like Rodney King and then we've got to make a fuss," Gooding said.
"There are more inspirational stories to be told, like Carl Brashear's, that I want to be a part of. There are black men who have contributed so much to our society in the things they've done that were not beyond the call of duty, but that they thought were just their job, just required of them as human beings. They overcame racial prejudices just by doing within the system what they felt is right. That's what I want to be a part of."
Brashear, now 69, was an inspirational fixture on set during the film's making. It was mentioned that the navy might honour Brashear by naming a ship after him.
What would Gooding like to have named after himself? "A big old bra-ssiere," he quipped, then stopped short, having surprised even himself with that one. "That was some loopy s--t there."
Men Of Honor was a movie Gooding almost didn't make. Frustrated by its US$32-million budget -- a modest figure given its underwater sequences and special effects -- he dropped out, unwilling to take a personal pay cut and angry at the movie business's lesser enthusiasm for funding dramas with black lead characters. Ironically, it took DeNiro, who is cast as the unrepentant bigot, to talk Gooding back onto the project by telling him, "You don't fight racism this way ... You make the movie and you show them."
"He was right," Gooding said, also willing to admit where else he's been wrong along his career path.
The business part of show business has sometimes distracted him, steering him toward some bad parts and away from some worthy ones, he admitted.
There was his lead role in last year's Chill Factor, a performance that Sun film critic Bruce Kirkland called "a kind of Stepin Fetchit thing, meaning he goes goggle-eyed, gets all aw-shucks and demeans himself like a Hollywood black who really knows his place. Didn't we get past that kind of pseudo-slave stereotype in movies?"
Gooding's intention in doing that movie was strategic, to establish himself as a contender for big comedy-action roles that often go to Chris Tucker and Martin Lawrence.
"I, of course, didn't realize that you also need a good script." He laughed, ruefully.
Business decisions
He leapt at last year's critically-panned Instinct, accepting the first salary he was offered because he so badly wanted to work with Anthony Hopkins. But he's also refused to even read other scripts because their budgets were too small to help his position in the Hollywood ranking.
"You have to make business decisions in your career and sometimes I do. I admit that. I won't always be that way."
Conversely, he happily took a pay cut, as did everyone in the cast, to make Rat Race, a Calgary-filmed Jerry Zucker comedy, because "it is just hilarious."
"You know, you lose that a little bit in this business of show business. You're talking to your business manager and he's going, 'Oh, you made this much this year and your (price is) going down'. And you're talking to your agents and they're like, 'Well, we can't put you in that because how are we going to get your quote on this?' You know what I mean? You get caught up in that s--t -- excuse me -- but you can't. You have to stay focused on the roles you want to do."
More Artists
