The actor, who played a slave in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, will be seen as the President of the United States in White House Down. He shares his experience of meeting Barack Obama and says he didn’t have the air where you had to say ‘Mr President’
When it comes to movie characters transitions, Jamie Foxx has come a long way in a short period of time. At the start of the year he was playing a subjugated slave, struggling for his freedom in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Now, this summer, he has graduated to playing one of the most powerful man in the world, the President of the United States, in White House Down.
“It is what I call the ‘evolution of freedom’,” begins Foxx, “to go from playing a slave to playing the President of the United States, in one year.” He laughs, “You know, I didn’t take too long! It was great to have the chains off and then get my suit on, because when you’re playing a slave it can wear on you a little bit.” Adds the 45-year-old Oscar winner, “Transitioning into this, with another fantastic cast, it’s just been a wonderful ride.”
Django, he says, was an incredible ride. “For anybody who loves cinema that movie was remarkable in the sense of how iconic the Django character is. A lot of people didn’t know in the States that Django overseas was already iconic. So to be in the movie with Quentin Tarantino and all of those great stars and just to see it jump off was amazing,” he says.
This “wonderful ride” sees filmmaker Roland Emmerich — the man behind blockbusters such as Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 — take the lead, with Foxx, Channing Tatum and Maggie Gyllenhaal galloping along at the head of an impressive cast. White House Down is an adrenaline pumping, high-stakes action movie.
Foxx takes on the role of President James Sawyer, Tatum a wannabe Secret Service agent, John Cale, who at the film’s outset fails in his bid to join the president’s elite security team.
When a heavily armed paramilitary group suddenly storms the White House, Sawyer and Cale become unlikely partners. “In the movie, my character, he doesn’t know how to shoot. He never picked up a machine gun before,” says Foxx.
By the end of the picture, Foxx’s character has had plenty of experience with weapons. The filmmakers are keen to stress that the movie is pure entertainment and certainly the characters are all entirely fictional. Foxx concedes, however, that he might have borrowed a few mannerisms and nuances from the present US President, Barack Obama.
The actor had visited the White House long before he signed up for White House Down and has an experience of meeting Obama. “I got a chance to go to the White House a couple of times. We did a Motown review for the President and I got a chance to go as the MC. It was interesting because everything you do at the White House has to be checked. They asked me what jokes was I going to tell and they made me write them out on a piece of paper. I gave them some jokes but I didn’t tell those. And as I was saying other jokes on the night you could see these guys going, ‘Those aren’t the jokes that he was supposed to be saying!’ I think I made a joke about President Obama dancing on The Ellen Show because President Obama didn’t dance so well,” he states.
Jokes apart, Foxx says he noticed that the president, “was presidential but at the same time you were able to walk up to him. He didn’t have the air where you had to say ‘Mr President.’ That’s why a lot of times people say ‘Obama’, because he felt like a friend. He felt like someone who was at ease. So I took a little bit of that, but what I do on screen is definitely not an impersonation of President Obama. We did a few things that may look familiar to you but we don’t exemplify him. It’s just cool that we have a black president at the time the movie is coming out.” Indeed, Foxx says that his relationship on screen with Tatum’s character is far from formal. “Our relationship is more like two guys, two fun guys,” he smiles.
One of the highlights of the White House Down shoot, he adds, was the opportunity to work with Tatum, the star of the GI Joe films, 21 Jump Street andMagic Mike.
“What I think is endearing about him is that — maybe it’s a Southern quality — he doesn’t take it too seriously,” Foxx says of his co-star. “Most people who get to this altitude, they get altitude sickness. With Channing, the altitude is high but he is still having a good time.”
Foxx’s altitude is also sky-high. He has built a dazzling career as a Grammy Award-winning musician and following his debut album in 1994 he has gone on to produce three albums that have charted highly on the Billboard 200: Unpredictable, which topped the chart, Best Night of My life and Intuition.
He started out as a stand-up comic and was featured on In living Colour show before earning his own sitcom The Jamie Foxx Show in 1996. As a film actor his career took off with 1999’s Any Given Sunday, which he followed with Ali, Stealth and Collateral.
He earned an Academy Award for his lead performance in the 2004 music biopic Ray and has since starred in Jarhead, MiamiVice, Dreamgirls, The Soloist, law Abiding Citizen and Django Unchained among others.
His career shows no sign of slowing down. Foxx is currently filming the next installment in The Amazing Spider-Man series, where he is starring as the villain, Max Dillon/Electro. It’s a role that has many people excited, especially, the actor concedes, his youngest daughter.
“My daughter is four now and about a year and a half ago she started obsessing on Spider-Man so all of her birthday parties had a Spider-Man theme,” he shares.
“Then when we had the call about Spider-Man I was, like, ‘Guess whatIJ Daddy is going to be in Spider-Man.’ And she was like, ‘You can’t be Spider-Man, daddy, you are black. There ain’t no black Spider-Man.’”
Foxx was able to take his daughter to the set. “And what was wonderful was that they had her come to where they make all of the characters and they put a little Spider-Man thing on her. It was fantastic. But when she realised I was playing the villain, she said, ‘Daddy, is Spider-Man going to beat you up IJ’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And then she just said, ‘Good! She loves Spider-Man!”