![\"John](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/John-Goodman-2019-Actor-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\")
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Fri 18 April 2025 16:05, UK <\/p>\n
There is something very wholesome about unlikely celebrity friendships. It\u2019s like when you\u2019re 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<\/a>\u2019s friendship is worth every moment of airtime. The frisson of joy it provides is one of the few things that can unite us all. <\/p>\n If you watch a Coen brothers movie, you might\u00a0think you had\u00a0John Goodman all figured out.\u00a0He is so much a part of their quirky universe that, at times, he seems like the inciting incident\u2014the foundational brick in the Jenga tower, the hinge on which everything hangs. But Goodman\u2019s career began long before he became the most crucial cast member on the Coens\u2019 rotating roster of stars. <\/p>\n He worked in theatre and did small parts in movies until his breakout role in David Byrne\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n His first role with the Coens was in their 1987 film Raising Arizona, but it wasn\u2019t until the \u201890s that he became inextricably linked to them with Barton Fink and The Big Lebowski. Throughout the \u201880s and early \u201890s, he was still a journeyman film actor, appearing in some good and terrible and mostly forgotten cinematic curiosities. <\/p>\n One of those forgotten movies looms large in Goodman\u2019s memory because of the unlikely friendship he made while working on it. 1991\u2019s 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\u2019Toole plays Sir Cedric Charles Willingham, Ralph\u2019s guide to all things British and royal. <\/p>\n Goodman would later admit that he was out of his depth<\/a> 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. \u201cI developed a friendship with Peter O\u2019Toole that lasts to this day, even though he has the bad taste to remain dead,\u201d Goodman said in a career retrospective for GQ<\/a> in 2019. \u201cI\u2019d never met anyone like Peter O\u2019Toole, and I don\u2019t reckon I ever will.\u201d<\/p>\n