John Goodman has spent more than four decades building one of the most durable careers in American entertainment, but the moment he has identified as his deepest regret had nothing to do with the roles he turned down or the years lost to drinking. months after the Roseanne revival was canceled within hours of a tweet, the actor told Jimmy Kimmel that he had quietly crashed for two weeks straight. “I thought, ‘Okay, I’d be a big boy. I’d handle this.
‘ And I just crashed,” he said, describing the collapse as neither loud nor public, but the kind that comes when something beloved is taken away before you are ready to let it go. Roseanne had premiered in October 1988 and immediately became a cultural phenomenon, averaging 36. 2 million viewers per episode by the end of its first season. Goodman played Dan Conner, the working-class father whose blunt warmth anchored the show, earning seven consecutive Emmy nominations without ever winning one.
He won the Golden Globe in 1993. The series ran 222 episodes and ended in 1997, and he has said the ending felt abrupt not because the material was exhausted but because nine years of showing up weekly created a gravity all its own. . Born June 20, 1952, in St.
Louis, Goodman was raised by his mother, Virginia, a waitress and saleswoman, after his father died when Goodman was a young boy. He was heavy early, bullied at school, and found refuge in comic books, comedy records, and football, which earned him a scholarship to Southwest Missouri State University. A torn ACL ended that plan, and he wandered into the campus drama department, where he has said he was “smitten” the first time he stood on a stage. His first film exposure came with True Stories in 1986, David Byrne’s offbeat portrait of small-town Texas, followed the next year by the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona, where he played escaped convict Gale Snoats opposite Nicolas Cage.
The Coens would become recurring collaborators, leading to Barton Fink in 1991 and The Big Lebowski in 1998, where his Walter Sobchak, a volatile Vietnam veteran bowler, became one of the most quoted characters in modern film. The role was based on screenwriter John Milius, and the car-smashing scene required 17 takes, destroying a new car each time. He also voiced Sulley in Pixar’s Monster’s Inc. in 2001, logging over a hundred hours in the recording booth, and lost 60 pounds to play a studio executive in the 2011 silent film The Artist.
. Through all of it, he has been candid about his drinking, admitting he sometimes arrived on set hung over, and describing getting sober in 2007 as simply saving his life. His loyalty to Roseanne Barr was forged early, when she clashed so severely with the show’s creator in the second season that she threatened to leave. Goodman backed her, along with Laurie Metcalf and George Clooney, and Matt Williams, the show’s creator, departed.
Behind the scenes, the atmosphere was not always easy, but he made her laugh in a particular way that she has recalled with affection for decades, sometimes until she peed herself, as he once put it with characteristic bluntness. When the Roseanne revival arrived in 2018, it drew 18. 2 million viewers on premiere night and 27 million after delayed viewing, the highest-rated scripted broadcast in nearly four years. Goodman described returning to Dan Conner as putting on an old pair of shoes.
Then, on May 29th, 2018, Barr posted a tweet comparing former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to an ape. ABC canceled the show within hours, call the remarks abhorrent. The network lost an estimated $60 million in advertising revenue. Barr blamed the sleeping medication Ambien; the drug manufacturer responded that racism was not a known side effect.
She eventually renounced her financial stake so the rest of the cast could continue working, and the spinoff The Conners launched October 16th, 2018, running six seasons until its close in 2024. . Goodman told the Sunday Times weeks after the cancellation that he knew for a fact she was not a racist. He also said he was broken-hearted.
He also said he thought, “Okay, it’s just show business. I’m going to let it go. ” Those three positions, the defense, the heartbreak, the attempted equanimity, existed in him simultaneously, which is what loyalty to a difficult person can feel like from the inside. Filming the first episode of The Conners without her, he has said, was “very weird.
” She was his buddy, and the specific thing they shared, sitting there making each other laugh, was gone. . Asked in 2023 whether he regretted defending her, he said no. He recalled a junket where interviews turned into an attack on her, making him very uncomfortable.
“I feel terrible about the whole thing. We had a great time and I love her. She’s just her own person,” he said. Asked if he thought they would work together again, he said he didn’t know if she’d want to, adding: “I miss her.
I wish her well. ”
That, he has said at 74, is what he regrets most. Not a role he took or declined, not the drinking years he has made peace with, not the Emmys that never converted, but something simpler and harder. Something wonderful became something painful, and the person at the center of both was the same person, his friend.
There is no clean resolution, no version of the story where everything gets repaired. You hold it, you carry it, you say you love her, and you keep showing up, the way he always has, hoping that counts for something on the other side of whatever went wrong. the time he spoke to Kimmel about the two weeks after the cancellation, he laughed about it, the way he laughs about things that aren’t funny yet but will be. Then he said he pulled himself together.
Then he went back to work. .
