Cuba Gooding Jr.: still passionate about his craft

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No one forgets the characters Cuba Gooding Jr. plays. Distinguished and versatile, Gooding can play for laughs, for thrills, or for tears.

This has been a busy year for the actor--he has four notable projects coming up. In November, he stars with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe in Ridley Scott's newest crime drama, American Gangster. The film tells the harrowing true story of a 1970s drug lord who used the coffins of American soldiers returning from Vietnam to smuggle heroin into Harlem. Gooding says he was drawn to the character of Nicky Barnes, a vicious drug lord who plays opposite Washington's title character, Frank Lucas.

"I'm always drawn to these characters with charisma," he says, adding that the role of Nicky Barnes is a gem. "He was a very colorful character; he was a dark character and I look forward to finding different nuances to a character that make powerful statements."

Gooding's breakout movie role was the irascible Tre Styles in the 1991 John Singleton coming-of-age classic Boyz n the Hood. He also won critical acclaim in films like Men of Honor, in which he played Carl Brashear, the first African-American to reach the rank of master diver in the U.S. Navy. He died in 2006 at age 75.

Gooding is probably best known for his Oscar-winning portrayal of the charmingly arrogant professional football player, Rod "Show Me the Money!" Tidwell, in Jerry Maguire. Following that Academy Award-winning performance, he says he became so picky about his movie roles that the offers stopped coming.

"Being so hard on the material that came my way, I wound up not working," he says. Gooding has been working a lot this year. He has wrapped filming the drama Hero Wanted with Ray Liotta and another drama, Linewatch, and he'll produce and star in the comedy Harold.

Still passionate about his craft, Gooding ventured into producing projects to get more stories told. "I love what I do. I really would do what I do for free," he says, adding that there are powerful African-Americans stories waiting to be shown on the big screen. "Denzel and I had a conversation ..., and we said why was it so long to do this?" he says.. "That's another reason I got into producing to tell these powerful stories. If we're not going to get it done--it's not going to get done."

COPYRIGHT 2007 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning