THE ART OF BEING A CONFIDENCE MAN

By Josh Tyrangiel

IF JAMIE FOXX WERE ONE OF THE MANY ACTORS WHO NEED constant approval, he probably would not have told his Collateral co-star Tom Cruise that they were destined to meet so that he could make Cruise hipper. Foxx also would not have advised Eddie Murphy to stop doing children's movies and "get back to being dangerous." Foxx certainly wouldn't have insisted that Ray Charles reveal the details of his infidelities when he met the singer shortly after being cast in the movie version of Charles' life. Like anyone else who makes his living in front of an audience, Foxx has an insecure side, but it wages a pitched battle for control of his personality with a confidence that borders on the absurd. "Five hundred years ago," says Foxx, "slaves got a message to a kid named Eric Bishop saying that he's going to change his name to Jamie Foxx and do great things with great people and inspire a generation." Sometimes that pitched battle is very one-sided.

The "great things with great people" part, though, is hard to deny. In addition to nailing his performance as Charles in Ray--not only proving he can carry a movie but making him the surest thing for an Oscar nomination this side of Julia Roberts playing the ugly girl--Foxx, 36, remains one of the top-grossing stand-up comedians on the planet, and earlier this year he collaborated with Twista and Kanye West on a No. 1 hit, Slow Jamz. Foxx signed a record deal last week with Clive Davis' J Records, which hopes to release a Jamie Foxx solo album by the spring of 2005, just around Oscar time. "I will never do this much publicity ever again in my life," says Foxx. "But this is kind of my moment here."

To attribute Foxx's moment solely to destiny obscures a more interesting struggle. When Foxx was 7 months old, his mother gave him up to her adoptive parents, who then adopted him and raised him as their son. That makes Foxx's biological mother his sister and his grandmother his mother. (Jack Nicholson and Eric Clapton grew up under similar arrangements.) "My grandmother was 60 years old when she adopted me," says Foxx. "She ran a nursery school and had a library in the house. She saw me reading early, saw I was smart and believed I was born to achieve truly special things."

Foxx blossomed into a superkid, leading the church choir at 15 and starring as a high school quarterback in Terrell, Texas. At the same time, he was acutely aware of being unwanted. His biological parents, he says, were 28 miles away in Dallas but rarely visited or noted his achievements. "I passed for more than 1,000 yards, the first quarterback at my high school to do that," says Foxx. "I was making the Dallas Morning News, and my father never came down. That's weird. Even to this day--nothing. I don't know if it's his religion--he's a Muslim--or ... I don't know. But that absence made me angry. It made me want to be something. I said, I'm going to make you look up one day and say, 'That's my son.'"

By the time Foxx won a piano scholarship to United States International University in San Diego, he had figured out how to convert his confidence and pain into fearlessness and ambition. At a Los Angeles comedy club in 1989, his then girlfriend urged him to grab the open mic and perform (though it's hard to imagine he needed much persuading). "I went on as Cosby, Cosby the gangster," Foxx recalls, slipping instantly into long, uncoiled Bill Cosby sentences punctuated with profanity. "I did Tyson. I did Reagan. When I got on that stage I felt like all the elements were finally in place. It was so easy."

Three years later, having changed his name from Eric Bishop to the gender-neutral Jamie Foxx (comedy-club owners at the time were booking women sight unseen), he landed on In Living Color, the sketch-comedy show that launched the careers of Jim Carrey, Jennifer Lopez and several dozen Wayanses. Foxx soon made a name for himself playing characters like Ugly Wanda on In Living Color, Crazy George on Roc and Bunz in Booty Call, a movie about a quest for condoms. (He also released an R&B album, Peep This, that he would like to forget.) But Foxx discovered that Ugly Wanda, Crazy George and Bunz are not names that scan well on the back of a head shot. Even though he had his own sitcom for five years on the WB, "when I started trying to do movies," he says, "people were like, 'We dig Jamie Foxx, but what's up with the choices?' They didn't understand; Booty Call was not a choice! It was what I did because I couldn't get work in anything better."

Foxx attributes the lack of good roles to a Hollywood slot system for black comics. "Will Smith has a slot," he says. "Martin Lawrence has a slot. Chris Tucker, Chris Rock, they all have slots. I needed to get a slot." (Foxx says this with no rancor; he believes white actors have it tougher because "there's so damn many of them.") He read for the Rod Tidwell role in Jerry Maguire with Tom Cruise (for which Cuba Gooding Jr. won an Oscar), but even after Oliver Stone gave him a breakout part as a rookie quarterback in Any Given Sunday--reportedly because first choice Sean (P. Diddy) Combs threw like a girl--nothing changed. "After Any Given Sunday--I'm not kidding--I got a script called The Next Hot Negro. The. Next. Hot. Negro."

Rather than smother a budding reputation, Foxx turned down every film role for a year. "I had something to fall back on," he says, referring to the lucrative stand-up tour he did in 2001. "But I believe that with acting, people will find you if you have talent. And I have talent." Sure enough, Michael Mann eventually saw Any Given Sunday and hired Foxx to play the worshipful corner man, Drew (Bundini) Brown, in Ali. He drew plaudits--and more bad scripts. Then Taylor Hackford called.

Hackford owned the film rights to Ray Charles' life story. The two men discussed the possibility of Foxx's playing the lead role, with Foxx displaying his usual confidence. "There was never any campaigning," says the director, laughing. "Jamie's too cool a customer. He just said, 'Yeah, you need me to do it.'" Foxx had the advantage of looking a lot like the young Charles, and after a meeting with the singer in which Foxx revealed the extent of his impressive piano skills--and Charles revealed the extent of his adultery--Foxx was given the role. "Jamie shares with Ray that huge ambition," says Hackford. "He has a voice that is going to come out somehow. But I have to admit, there was nothing he'd done that showed me he actually could do the part. I just had to leap."

The meeting between Foxx and Charles lasted for just one hour, but Hackford videotaped it, and Foxx began his preparation by watching the tape on an endless loop for six weeks. "What I saw was him not being Ray Charles," Foxx says. "I saw how he orders his food, how he talks to his assistant, how he talks to his woman." Foxx worked on Charles' stammer by listening to an audio cassette of an old talk show with Dinah Shore. "Dinah goes, 'Talk about the drugs, Ray.' And he stops for four or five seconds. Then he goes, 'Eh uh well uh ...' So every time in the movie someone confronts him with something--'Ray, I'm pregnant!'--it's 'Eh uh well uh.'"

Foxx is not a Method actor--he works visually, making lots of faces in the mirrors around his house--but he dropped 40 lbs., learned Charles' keyboard-fingering technique and insisted on wearing prosthetic eyelids that blinded him for most of the shoot. "At a certain point you realize that this is your shot," says Foxx. "So if you're going to do it, do it right. I wasn't trying to show off my actorliness or anything, but it helped the performance because you realize he never saw his kids, his family, his fans. He had to take somebody's word for everything. It made it much easier to understand why he had his guard up, what caused him pain."

Foxx's performance is flawless, and off the buzz for Ray, he is already rolling in new, high-quality scripts, the first of which, Collateral, has already opened. "Will Smith is at the front of the conveyor belt," he says, "but I'm carving my own little slot. My professional life ain't bad." Neither is his other life. Foxx splits time between his L.A. and Las Vegas homes, trailed by a large group of friends. "We play music together, write songs, read scripts, hang with girls, play basketball." (Sometimes he combines activities; a recent headline blared, FOXX SAYS SORRY FOR NAKED BASKETBALL ANTICS.) The actor socializes with many of the people he has impersonated, and is particularly tight with Cruise and Murphy, his idol, whom he describes as "still the funniest man in the world." (After he counseled Murphy to get dangerous, the comic, Foxx claims, responded, "Next movie I ain't gonna be in no forest with no bears and no kids.")

Life would be even better with an Academy Award nomination, and Foxx isn't shy about saying so. "You'd be stupid not to want that," he says. "It allows you to get better projects." If he were to win, he says the first and only person he'd thank would be his 95-year-old mother, who suffers from Alzheimer's but is otherwise healthy. He will not cry though. "I always tell people, do not cry on television, because they will run that over and over again. Who was the big black dude? Ving Rhames!" he shouts, making blubbering noises. "From here on out it's 'Ving Rhames, the one who cried at the Golden Globes, plays a gangster in his new film, but he's very sensitive when it comes to getting trophies.' I cannot cry. You've got to be confident up there." And to get there.