![\"John](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/John-Goodman-Actor-2022-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\")
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Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Still<\/p>\n
Wed 3 June 2026 21:15, UK <\/p>\n
A busy actor is not necessarily a happy actor, so even though he was never out of work for too long, John Goodman<\/a> was still troubled by the notion that his career had started to circle the drain.<\/p>\n Obviously, there was no real danger of him being left at home, twiddling his thumbs and desperately hoping for the next script to drop through his letterbox. He\u2019s John fucking Goodman, after all, and as one of the industry\u2019s foremost character actors, the next movie was never too far away.<\/p>\n However, quantity had started to take precedence over quality, leaving him to wonder if his best days were well and truly behind him. To put things into perspective, between 1996 and 2019, there were only two years where Goodman didn\u2019t appear in at least two features, so he wasn\u2019t on the unemployment line.<\/p>\n That said, somewhere in the middle of that run, the good parts seemed to dry up<\/a>. Things reached a head around the 2010s, when the Coen brothers regular realised that what he\u2019d been making was mostly shite. We\u2019re not exaggerating, either, looking at the 11 films he starred in from August 2007 to October 2010 alone.<\/p>\n James Wan\u2019s Death Sentence was a panned flop, Evan Almighty was panned even harder and flopped even harder, Speed Racer was another bust, Confessions of a Shopaholic was turgid fluff, and the only interesting thing about Pope Joan<\/a> was that it got him sued and was roundly denounced by the Vatican.<\/p>\n In terms of volume, those were not lean years. In terms of worthwhile projects, they most certainly were. \u201cI was sitting around for a couple of months, and the phone wasn\u2019t ringing,\u201d Goodman acknowledged. \u201cAnd it was very difficult, because I thought I\u2019d pretty much had it. I was trying to start to think of what I could do to create work for myself.\u201d<\/p>\n As often tends to be the case in Hollywood, salvation was right around the corner. Goodman\u2019s first movie of 2011 was The Artist, which won five Academy Awards, including \u2018Best Picture\u2019. In his second, he was the best thing by miles in Kevin Smith\u2019s Red State, the filmmaker\u2019s best work in years, and his third, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, was another \u2018Best Picture\u2019 nominee.<\/p>\n Further reading: Cutting Room Floor<\/strong><\/p>\n The following year, he lent support in his second consecutive \u2018Best Picture\u2019 winner when he played John Chambers in Ben Affleck\u2019s Argo, stole every scene he was in opposite Denzel Washington in Robert Zemeckis\u2019 Flight, and reunited with the Coens<\/a> for the first time in over a decade in Inside Llewyn Davis, with The Hangover Part III and Monsters University adding two huge hits by the end of 2013.<\/p>\n You can\u2019t really call it a comeback, since Goodman never went away, but after churning out terrible film after terrible film just a couple of years previously, he found his groove again, and in some style, too.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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