Cuba Gooding Jr wants us to know that sleeping with Helen Mirren was one of the highlights of his career. “Dame Mirren!” he yelps, lifting himself out of his chair with one of his trademark high-energy power bursts. “Oh yeah! It was awesome! Because she is so awesome, so talented and so ... sexy!”
The 44-year-old actor and Oscar winner is referring to the 2005 thriller Shadowboxer, in which he starred with Mirren as a pair of assassins and lovers (cue sex on the bed, on the floor and in the woods). “Although she said a strange thing to me back then,” he continues, suddenly serious. “She said: ‘You are going to come into your own as an actor when you turn 50.’ At the time I was like [does shock-horror face]. But, you know what, it seems to be manifesting itself right now.”
For “right now” the Jerry Maguire star, who was once in danger of becoming a straight-to-video punchline (seen Wrong Turn at Tahoe? The Devil’s Tomb? Me neither), is involved in several high-profile projects. First, he’s landed a key role in the Oscar-baiting Lee Daniels drama, The Butler, a real-life historical tale about the White House butler Eugene Allen, who served under eight US presidents. Then there’s the controversial thriller Broken Doll — also due for release next year — about a relationship between a schoolgirl and a policeman that is, he says, “an amazing script and an amazing story”.
Before these, however, is Red Tails, a Second World War blockbuster produced by George Lucas and the reason why Gooding is here today in a London hotel room, bulging with athletic vitality (he adheres to a strict fitness regime of boxing and ice hockey). His default setting is buzzy positivity, but he is also serious and thoughtful on subjects such as the movie industry’s approach to race: “It’s getting better in Hollywood, in terms of seeing lead actors, male and female, as people from all races and creeds. At least, I think it’s getting better.”
Red Tails is the true story of an all African-American fighter squadron known as the Tuskegee Airmen (after their training base in Tuskegee, Alabama), and how they had to battle racism on the ground to win permission to fight the Luftwaffe in the skies.
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Gooding stars as the stoical, pipe-smoking base commander Major Emanuelle Stance in a performance that, for him anyway, is startlingly atypical in its quiet restraint. Most surprisingly, the film’s racial politics are conciliatory where they might rightly have been vituperative, and the movie’s white racist pilots are shown to be capable of radical, almost instant, change and contrition. It’s a tone that was almost undone when Lucas recently complained that he had to fund the film (budget $60 million) because no one in Hollywood wanted to back an exclusively black story.
Does Gooding have any feelings about this? “No feelings that I want to express,” he says. “What it taught me is that movies that make great statements are always met with hesitation, because they’re outside the box. And this is one of those movies that is outside the box.”
Indeed, as if to underscore the movie’s conciliatory tone, when it was recently screened at the White House President Obama was careful to describe it as a great tale of “American heroism” rather than an African-American story.
Gooding was there. Was it daunting, watching the film with the Pres? “Yes, but it was also really cool,” he says. “Because we got there in the middle of the morning and it didn’t screen until seven that night. So we spent all those hours just being there. At one point we were in the room with just the President and Michelle Obama. Just drinking beer. Just talking.”
He adds that he’s also seen the film with George H. W. Bush and his wife Barbara (“They were crying during the movie”). And George W? It’s been reported that George Sr asked for a copy of the film to show to his son. “He might have said that, but he didn’t say it to me. So it’s probably just a good story.”
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Hobnobbing with presidents is a long way from the straight-to-video doldrums of Gooding’s previous decade. Theories abound as to why he couldn’t capitalise on his Oscar win (for Jerry Maguire in 1996). The toughest is from his friend Lee Daniels, who claimed that Gooding’s acceptance speech (a barrage of leaps and bounds and “I love you!”) turned off audiences. “It was a Stepin Fetchit performance,” said Daniels, after the much-derided actor who specialised in “lazy Negro” archetypes. “He lost respect.”
I mention this to Gooding and he mounts a vigorous defence that begins: “Let’s break down that night, in fact, no, let’s break down that whole speech . . .” He explains that by the end of the night the Oscar audience was thinking: “He won because he’s obviously good, right? I mean, I think he’s good because he won, but let’s see if we get evidence to the contrary.”
He also mentions his poor choice of agents and managers, who offered him anodyne studio fodder while hiding edgier, more interesting fare (he was offered Kevin Bacon’s role in the critically acclaimed drama The Woodsman, but found out about it only after the film had been released).
But, mostly, the elephant in the room is surely money, and his deep-rooted need for financial security? “Oh yes, security is a big issue with me,” he admits. “I have two boys and a girl and I pride myself on knowing that they’ve grown up in one house.”
He is referring to his own childhood where, as the son of a famous soul vocalist — Cuba Gooding Sr of the Main Ingredient — he briefly lived the Los Angeles high life before crashing, at the age of 12, into abject poverty when his father left home.
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“People don’t understand,” he says. His mother moved him and his three siblings from motels to hotels. He often found himself breakdancing on street corners for food. “No one will ever understand that feeling of not knowing where you’re going to sleep at night, or where your next meal is coming from. It’s terrifying. As the years go by you forget about those times but you never forget that feeling.”
It’s thus hardly surprising that he parlayed a big-screen breakthrough as the straight arrow Tre in Boyz n the Hood (1991) into an almost voracious appetite for employment, often squeezing two or three TV movies into the same year as a prestige studio project such as A Few Good Men. Indeed, even today, when I ask him about another new project called One in the Chamber he says, like a dieter admitting to a chocolate binge, “That’s a film I shot with Dolph Lundgren in Bucharest.” Enough said.
Offscreen, Gooding is the proverbial family man, married to his highschool sweetheart Sara since 1994 (Their secret? “Not taking each other too seriously”). He very occasionally appears in the tabloids, as he did last month for dancing drunkenly on a New York bar top. “I’m a physical guy, and dancing is part of that,” he explains. “So when I’m filming or doing promotional tours I go out to nightclubs and dance.” But mostly he’s consumed by home life, and worries about his 17-year-old son, who’s just started driving (“It’s scary!”).
He says that, in retrospect, he’s glad about the way his career has gone Without the hardships he wouldn’t be able to play “the intense, gravitas-filled guys I’m getting offered now”. And besides, he says, it’s not about the work. “It’s about getting older, and wanting to live in the moment. And right now, the moment I have is pretty good.”
Red Tails is released on Wednesday