John Goodman on 'Digger,' Tom Cruise, and a Fractured Hip in London

John Goodman, 74, spoke with The New Yorker from Charleston, South Carolina, where he relocated from New Orleans after three decades there; his Pacific Palisades home burned in last year's wildfires. He appears as an ailing, oafish U.S. President in Alejandro González Iñárritu's dystopian satire 'Digger,' starring Tom Cruise as an oilman. The film opened this month to sharply polarized reviews and is projected to lose roughly $250 million, which Goodman said critics and forecasters condemned before release. During production he fell in stocking feet on set while moving around Cruise, fracturing his hip; he was treated at Cleveland Clinic London and was functional within a month. Goodman, sober since 2007 at age 55, said he once weighed nearly 400 pounds and later had stomach surgery. He recalled playing Bottom opposite Kathleen Turner's Titania at Southwest Missouri State University, moving to New York in 1975, and early work in commercials including Mennen Skin Bracer. He described auditioning for the Coen brothers on 'Raising Arizona' and their later writing 'Barton Fink,' 'The Big Lebowski' and 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' with him in mind, and cited Oliver Hardy, W. C. Fields and Marlon Brando as influences. He said he would like to play Old Man Tyrone in 'Long Day's Journey into Night.'