Actor Jamie Foxx put a lot of preparation and focus into his Oscar-winning performance in the film Ray. But while portraying the iconic songwriter, Foxx’s body initially couldn’t handle fully immersing himself into his role.
Jamie Foxx felt like an embarrassment after filming ‘Ray’
The late singer Ray Charles was instrumental in the casting process of his 2004 biopic Ray. Charles wanted to make sure the actor portraying him would be able to do him justice, insisting to meet Foxx in person.
After their encounter, Foxx’s audition meant trying to hang with Charles on the piano. According to Ray director Taylor Hackford, that was the day Foxx proved himself to the musician. Although not without some difficulty.
“Ray didn’t let up on him. He said, ‘Come on, man, it’s right under your fingers. Come on, man.’ The pressure was almost embarrassing,” Hackford once said according to CS Monitor.
It wasn’t the only time Foxx might have felt embarrassed, however, when it came to Ray. His performance as Charles garnered heavy critical praise, and even won him an Oscar for Best Actor in 2005. But before his win, Foxx figured he had no chance of winning the prize.
“When I was up for the Oscar I didn’t take it seriously at all,” Foxx once said at Tribeca Film Festival (via IndieWire). “I thought there was no way to win that. I took [Oscar season] as an excuse to party. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m nominated? Break out the champagne and let’s party.’ I remember having paparazzi on me for the first time. I remember going absolutely nuts.”
The actor received a scolding for his behavior from many, including his own publicist.
“What are you doing? You see how embarrassing this is? You’ve got a chance, but you got to walk a certain way,” Fox remembered his publicist telling him.
After conversations with others like Oprah and Sydney Poitier, who also reprimanded him for his antics, Foxx toned down his behavior.
Jamie Foxx hyperventilated on the set of ‘Ray’
Foxx had to go through quite the physical transformation to get ready for Ray. He had to lose 30 pounds for the role in order to match Charles’ wiry frame.
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“It’s tough when you’re eating really good,” Foxx once joked to the New York Times. “There was a period of about four days when I was like, ‘What the hell is going on with my body and my mind?’”
But perhaps the most difficult part about Ray was putting on the prosthesis to make Foxx blind in the film. Foxx described the process as agonizing.
“First we glued my eyelids closed and that was crazy. You gotta get me soap, this is not gonna work! I hyperventilated the first few times and then they finally got it right and got the method down from five hours to maybe like an hour to get them done and made it easier,” he once said according to Black Film.
Still, he likened the experience to being buried.
“Oh yeah, they had to hold me down because it’s like being in a coffin alive. That was the sense of it because I couldn’t open my eyes. Even if I opened my eyes I still couldn’t see anything because the prosthetics was over the whole eyelid. It was freakish. After six hours there’s not people anymore, there’s little bitty voices just sitting around and everybody is talking at the same time and people are just hitting stuff and tapping on stuff and it drives you nuts,” Foxx said.
Jamie Foxx described his most vivid memory with Ray Charles
Foxx was able to spend some time with Ray Charles before the singer’s death. In a 2005 Q & A with Rolling Stone, he pinpointed some of his fondest and clearest memories with his idol.
“Playing the blues with him,” Foxx said. “And him telling me what went on in his life, being an open book when I asked him questions about the women and the drugs and about being so far ahead of his time. I’ll remember how simple he was – there was no ‘star’ thing.”
With their interactions, Foxx saw that Charles was also embracing his mortality.
“I could tell he was getting ready to move on to the next phase of his existence, on the other side,” he said.
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