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Spotlight By: Rick Mele
Chances are, unless you’ve been living in isolation the past three years, you’ve seen and heard plenty from Jamie Foxx lately. With big-budget blockbusters like Collateral and Miami Vice, an Oscar-winning turn in the biopic Ray, and an award-winning album in Unpredictable, Foxx has certainly been busy recently. But even with all that media saturation, you’ve probably never seen the charismatic Foxx quite like this. His new movie Dreamgirls is already poised to be a major Oscar contender and a genuine star-maker for newcomer Jennifer Hudson. For Foxx, however, it’s a chance to venture into some new territory. The film, an adaptation of the Broadway play of the same name, follows a three woman R&B group trying to make it big in the 1960s pop music scene. Alongside Beyoncé Knowles, Eddie Murphy, and the afore-mentioned Hudson, Foxx plays Curtis Taylor Jr., their aggressive and just downright mean manager, who takes the girls’ group to new heights. Most of the initial buzz revolves around Jennifer Hudson’s surprise star turn, but having the notoriously charming Foxx play the film’s main villain has raised more than a few eyebrows as well: “Even Oprah said ‘I don’t like you being mean!’ I was like, ‘Oprah, that’s not really me.’ …The persona of Jamie Foxx and the character [are] different.” For Foxx, this was more than just an opportunity to play against the grain, it was also a necessity for the script: “I think if we’d have done the play of it, then you’d give Curtis… a soliloquy and a nice song, and some wings and let him fly off the stage. But in the movie… it was important to play Curtis unforgiving and relentless so [the other actors] would have somewhere to go.” In crafting the ruthless Curtis, Foxx drew on his personal experience, saying “Everybody has a Curtis in their life. Everybody in here, you can think of the person who told you you weren’t going to make it… and you wanted to make it because of that. Curtis is this guy that I met in doing my record… So I took those elements to show you what Curtis was about. It’s like a mix of all these other record people out there. In this business that we’re in, when you see those overbearing managers that can deliver the dream, but can’t execute it, that’s what Curtis was. [He’s] become this hardened character.” As Foxx talks, it becomes clear that, for him, the journey of his character was the most important part. But before you accuse Foxx of merely intellectualizing Curtis after the fact, he’d like to remind you, “I have an Oscar… I got a BET award.” Seriously though, Foxx says that while shooting, a conscious effort was made to keep Curtis’s character as raw and bristling as possible, even down to his musical numbers: “I went down, [and] I said, I only wanna sing it once. Because Curtis shouldn’t be the artist, Curtis should be the manager. ... |
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