(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Fri 18 April 2025 16:05, UK
There is something very wholesome about unlikely celebrity friendships. It’s like when you’re scrolling through an algorithm and find a video of a donkey snuggling with a kitten or a dog adopting a family of orphaned ducklings. Is it real? Is it staged? Who cares? It provides a momentary glimpse at improbable harmony in this world of chaos and carnage. This is why Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg’s friendship is worth every moment of airtime. The frisson of joy it provides is one of the few things that can unite us all.
If you watch a Coen brothers movie, you might think you had John Goodman all figured out. He is so much a part of their quirky universe that, at times, he seems like the inciting incident—the foundational brick in the Jenga tower, the hinge on which everything hangs. But Goodman’s career began long before he became the most crucial cast member on the Coens’ rotating roster of stars.
He worked in theatre and did small parts in movies until his breakout role in David Byrne’s True Stories in 1986. Two years later, he landed a role on the sitcom Roseanne, which made him a recognisable figure in millions of households.
His first role with the Coens was in their 1987 film Raising Arizona, but it wasn’t until the ‘90s that he became inextricably linked to them with Barton Fink and The Big Lebowski. Throughout the ‘80s and early ‘90s, he was still a journeyman film actor, appearing in some good and terrible and mostly forgotten cinematic curiosities.
One of those forgotten movies looms large in Goodman’s memory because of the unlikely friendship he made while working on it. 1991’s King Ralph is a bizarre little film about a Las Vegas lounge singer (Goodman) who becomes the King of the United Kingdom after the entire royal family is accidentally electrocuted to death by their photographer (as depicted in a very chipper opening scene). Peter O’Toole plays Sir Cedric Charles Willingham, Ralph’s guide to all things British and royal.
Goodman would later admit that he was out of his depth and felt inadequate in the role, though it was clearly the script and general scenario of the film that was to blame. Still, his major takeaway from the experience was personal rather than professional. “I developed a friendship with Peter O’Toole that lasts to this day, even though he has the bad taste to remain dead,” Goodman said in a career retrospective for GQ in 2019. “I’d never met anyone like Peter O’Toole, and I don’t reckon I ever will.”
That seems like a safe bet. O’Toole was one of the great characters of cinema throughout the 1960s and ‘70s. Known for being a hard-drinking hellraiser, he was a wildly charismatic figure with more tales of wild exploits than most of Hollywood’s stars put together. “I just loved listening to him talk, and he just loved talking,” Goodman said, remembering that during the production of the movie, O’Toole would take him to pubs around London and, since he’d stopped drinking, would watch him drink instead and regale him with stories. “I wanted to be him when I grew up,” Goodman concluded. “I just loved Pedro.”
Related Topics
Subscribe To The Far Out Newsletter