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These days, John Goodman has aged into his role as one of Hollywood’s most beloved, reliable, and regularly employed character actors. In the last few years alone, he’s starred in the as-yet-untitled blockbuster uniting Alejandro González Iñárritu and Tom Cruise, played a series regular on HBO’s hilarious The Righteous Gemstones, and appeared in the Godzilla spinoff TV series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.
However, he wasn’t always so comfortable with his working life, and once went through such a dark period that he tried to quit his most famous role at the height of its popularity – before being blackmailed into staying.
Before 1988, Goodman steadily built his career as a movie actor by delivering memorable supporting turns in films like Raising Arizona, Revenge of the Nerds, and The Big Easy. However, his career jumped up several notches when he was cast as the co-lead of an ABC sitcom that became the number one show in America as quickly as its second season. That show was, of course, Roseanne, in which Goodman played comedian Roseanne Barr’s sporadically employed construction worker husband Dan Conner.
While Roseanne was a consistent hit in the ratings and an essential part of ABC’s television lineup, the set was a pretty tumultuous place to work. Barr wasn’t exactly known for being a wallflower, and regularly fought with studio executives, while Goodman struggled to cope with the intense pressure he felt from becoming so famous. In fact, to deal with losing his anonymity, he admitted to drowning his sorrows in many a bottle, and he soon became a full-blown alcoholic. By the time the show’s seventh season rolled around, Goodman was in a bad way.
“I got complacent and ungrateful,” Goodman admitted to Today. “I wanted to leave the show. I handled it like I did everything else, by sittin’ on a bar stool. And that made it worse.”
Regarding his dependency on alcohol, which he was finally able to conquer in 2007, Goodman told The New York Times, “I don’t know how much the old Jackie Daniel’s franchise ruined my memory, which is going anyway, because of my advancing decrepitude. I had a 30-year run, and at the end, I didn’t care about anything. I was just fed up with myself. I didn’t even want to be an actor anymore.”
During that dark period in 1995, though, Goodman didn’t just idly talk about wanting out of Roseanne – he actually walked off the set and told producers he was quitting. He claimed he thought the show was “ready to die after the sixth season,” but to his chagrin, nobody else involved felt the same. They also weren’t about to let Goodman walk away from something that was making everyone so much money, so they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
“I tried to get out in the seventh,” Goodman confessed to The New Republic in 2014. “They suggested that if I did so, they wouldn’t mind taking my house from me. ‘Thank you very much,’ I said, and I stuck around.”
In the end, Roseanne ran for nine seasons, and Goodman was there to the bitter end. However, by the time the show was revived in 2018, he was in a much better place personally and professionally, and was happy to return to the comfy flannels of Dan. When that reboot was swiftly cancelled amid the controversy of Barr making some very off-colour comments about President Barack Obama, though, Goodman stuck around yet again. He took the lead in The Conners, a Roseanne spinoff without its titular character, and in March 2025, that show entered its seventh and final season.
“This time around, I think everybody in the cast is very grateful to be there,” Goodman smiled. “I started looking back fondly and realized how lucky I had been — and I really feel that now.”
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