(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 3 August 2025 0:23, UK
Long before John Goodman became an actor, he had a deep affinity for one of the greatest movie monsters ever created. In fact, he remembers watching the original movie as a wide-eyed ten-year-old, stunned at what he was seeing onscreen.
Decades later, the Missouri native established himself as one of Hollywood’s most in-demand character actors by building a wildly varied filmography of silver screen and television credits. He was a mainstay in Coen brothers movies, a beloved sitcom star, a versatile voice actor, and the kind of actor who worked with the best directors in the business, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Robert Zemeckis, to name a few.
However, it wasn’t until Goodman was well into his 60s that his childhood monster came back into his life in a way that caught him completely off guard. Indeed, when director Jordan Vogt-Roberts approached him about starring in 2017’s Kong: Skull Island, a new version of the giant ape’s story, envisioned as part of a ‘Monsterverse’ of films alongside Godzilla, he didn’t quite know what to say.
“I never thought I’d have a shot of doing anything like this,” Goodman, then 64, told the Daily News. “I don’t fit any of the types that would be in a King Kong movie.”
However, Vogt-Roberts insisted that the actor was the right man to play Bill Randa, a shadowy Monarch agency member researching the possible existence of enormous creatures in remote and subterranean parts of the world. It is Randa who charters an expedition to Skull Island, Kong’s home, which is chock-full of all manner of terrifying primordial beasties just waiting to chow down on unsuspecting humans.
Goodman was excited to star in Kong: Skull Island, and took his character as seriously as any movie he’d made that didn’t involve 100-feet-tall CGI apes and ravenous lizards known as Skullcrawlers. “All these weird conspiracy theories you’ve ever heard, they’re all true,” Goodman told Den of Geek about Randa’s outlook on the world.
“He had first-hand knowledge of it from his Navy experience. I think it scarred him for life and sent him on this quest, to the point where he’s become like Captain Ahab. It just doesn’t really matter what else happens as long as he proves that these things exist.”
To him, the story of Kong has become American mythology, and with each new iteration of the tale, it tackles themes that are relevant to the time. For example, the 1976 remake starring Jeff Bridges was about oil, while Kong: Skull Island is very much a metaphor for the Vietnam War. “It’s whatever you want to say about American imperialism or man’s tendency to conquer places he has no business in,” Goodman mused.
At the end of the day, though, while the adult Goodman enjoyed digging into the political and social themes of Kong’s new story, the ten-year-old inside him was simply jazzed at being part of something he never thought was on the cards.
Amusingly, though, he admitted that starring in the movie had one unfortunate side effect: it reminded him that Father Time wasn’t on his side anymore. “Motherfucker’s only 19 years older than I am,” he grumbled amiably about Kong, who debuted on-screen in 1933, “I just thought about that today and went, ‘Shit, man, I’m getting up there’.”
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