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 Oscar-winner Cuba Gooding Jr. has put his arrogant, Hollywood bigshot personna in the past and is now starring in such lowbrow fare as Daddy Day Camp. |
Cuba Gooding Jr. broke out in the seminal ghetto drama Boyz N the Hood and has an Oscar to show for his flamboyant performance as strutmeister Rod Tidwell in Jerry Maguire.
How things have changed. Now he's fussing with an exploding outhouse in Daddy Day Camp, a family flick bustling with dogs, skunks, kids and juvenile humour. No worries about preparing another Oscar speech for this low-brow comedy, which opens wide tomorrow.
So you wonder what Gooding, the Bronx-born son of R&B performers of the 1960s, is going to be like on a Toronto visit to hype the flick. He has been known to be arrogant. There are stories about him calming down, growing up and getting personable in recent times.
Hallelujah, that's the Cuba Gooding Jr. that walks through the door of a hotel suite to chat up his flick. Some highlights of the conversion:
On replacing Eddie Murphy in the role of Charlie Hinton, one of two best buds who ran Daddy Day Care in the original hit family movie:
"It is odd. The thing I told myself is that it wasn't a sequel. I didn't have any of the co-stars from the first movie and all the kids we found were new kids and the director (former child star Fred Savage in his feature directorial debut) was new. And a lot of the themes of family really developed in working with Fred. So it felt like we were starting over. We started from scratch."
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On working with kids and animals, something that Hollywood legend and curmudgeon W.C. Fields warned against:
"It's a bit of a trick navigating the water of child stars. But these kids were great because they were all new kids (except for Spencir Bridges, son of Todd Bridges of Diff'rent Strokes). You'll see a lot of kids that we just found in Utah (where the movie was shot). They came in and read and they were brilliant. We got blessed with the chemistry of these kids just getting along real good.
"But you've just got to be really patient because the real sense of being a kid is spontaneity and that is damn near the complete opposite of moviemaking."
On Savage's direction and his ease with the kid actors:
"He was really a Barnum & Bailey on this movie, really a circus ringleader."
On doing yet another family flick:
"It's great because I have three movies coming out later this year that are all R-rated thrillers. It's good to jump into this thing and just do something light and fun."
On waiting for the release of Ridley Scott's crime drama American Gangster, in which he appears opposite major co-stars Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe:
"I can't wait to see how much of him (his support character) will be mentioned in the movie. When I see it, I'll be watching by myself.
"I remember Coming to America and I had that big scene cut out and I'm just sitting there at the Hollywood premiere. It was devastating and my girlfriend, now my wife, Sarah, was saying, 'Don't worry, they'll come back to it!' Yeah, come back to what? I wanted to sink into my seat. But, you know, that's film."
On what controls his ego:
"Kids and the wife! You can do something so insane and have girls crying and screaming as you sign a piece of paper for them at the premiere ... and then go home and pick up dog poop because it's your day. That's how you balance it."
On Hollywood moviemaking:
"We're healing in some way, people, and you've just got to let that sink into your psyche and go with the flow. But this is not the cure for cancer!"
On getting a fresh perspective, especially by shedding the Hollywood entourage he used to like having around, even when he wasn't working:
"I'd go home and wait for people to bring me stuff. Now my rule is that, on a film, you have to have an assistant. But, the day the movie ends, boom! That's it! I'm back to driving myself places and getting groceries for myself.
"You just have to get yourself in that mindset because it'll affect the work if you think you're that guy who has the Oscar. You can't do that. You have to disconnect."