John Goodman

Some actors you recognise by their face, others by their voice. With John Goodman it's both: he's the big man who spent sixteen seasons, across two series, grumbling about the bills on the Conners' sofa, and he's the rumble behind Sulley, Pixar's blue monster. He was born in Affton, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, on 20 June 1952, and there was nothing cinematic about his childhood. His father, a postal worker, died of a heart attack when Goodman was two, and his mother raised three children by waiting tables at a barbecue joint, working in a shop and taking in laundry.

From college football to the stage

He arrived at Southwest Missouri State University on a football scholarship and tore his cruciate ligament before playing a single game. The injury left him without a sport and pushed him towards the drama department, where his classmates included two future actresses, Kathleen Turner and Tess Harper. A fine arts degree followed in 1975, and with very little to fall back on he moved to New York.

What followed was a decade of graft: off-Broadway theatre, television commercials and small parts to cover the rent. His Broadway debut didn't arrive until 1985, playing Huckleberry Finn's drunken father in the musical 'Big River'. The New York stage saw him again much later, in 'Waiting for Godot' (2009) and 'The Front Page' (2016).

The Coens and Walter Sobchak

No partnership has shaped his career like the one with Joel and Ethan Coen, who pulled him out of obscurity in 'Raising Arizona' (1987) as a convict fresh out of prison. They have called on him four more times since: Barton Fink (1991), as the insurance salesman next door whose smile is far too friendly; O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), as a one-eyed Bible salesman; and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013).

That relationship also produced the role that turned him into a cult figure. Walter Sobchak, the Vietnam veteran who keeps a handgun in his bowling bag in The Big Lebowski (1998), is still one of the most quoted creations in nineties cinema, and Goodman built him out of permanent outrage alongside Jeff Bridges and Steve Buscemi.

There was plenty of work elsewhere too. For Steven Spielberg he played a bomber pilot in Always (1989), a fifties horror showman in Joe Dante's Matinee (1993) and, above all, Fred Flintstone in The Flintstones (1994), a rubber-costumed hit that followed him around for years.

Dan Conner and working-class America

While cinema was discovering him, television handed him his most popular part. In Roseanne (1988-1997) he was Dan Conner, a building contractor who argued about money at the kitchen table and one of the most convincing portraits of working-class life the American sitcom has produced. It won him the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a comedy series in 1993 and seven Emmy nominations between 1989 and 1995. With Roseanne Barr and Laurie Metcalf he formed a trio that has been hard to match.

The show returned in 2018 with almost all of the original cast and enormous ratings, only for ABC to cancel it months later over a racist tweet by Barr. The network regrouped the rest of the cast in The Conners (2018-2025), where Goodman carried on as Dan, now a widower, for another seven seasons.

He and Barr are no longer in contact: in 2025 he said he hadn't spoken to her "for about seven or eight years", and in 2026 it was Barr herself who revealed he had turned down a cameo in the comedy she is using to attempt a comeback.

His other substantial television role has been Eli Gemstone, patriarch of the crooked televangelist dynasty in The Righteous Gemstones (2019-2025), the comedy created by Danny McBride. Before that he spent time in the post-Katrina New Orleans of Treme (2010), and in 2007 he finally won an Emmy, as a guest actor on Studio 60. Add to that thirteen turns hosting 'Saturday Night Live' and a well-remembered run on Community.

From Pixar to the White House

A good part of his younger audience has never seen his face. Goodman is Sulley, the furry monster who frightens children reluctantly in Monsters, Inc. (2001) opposite Billy Crystal, a role he took up again in Monsters University (2013) and the series Monsters at Work (2021). There is also the peasant Pacha in The Emperor's New Groove (2000), Big Daddy La Bouff in The Princess and the Frog (2009) and Papa Smurf in Smurfs (2025).

From around 2010 his live-action work turned towards high-grade supporting parts, and some of his best performances are there: the studio boss in Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist (2011); the Hollywood make-up artist who puts together a fake film for the CIA in Ben Affleck's Argo (2012), which brought him a Screen Actors Guild award for best ensemble; and the dealer and old friend of the pilot played by Denzel Washington in Robert Zemeckis' Flight (2012).

His most unsettling work is Howard, the man who locks Mary Elizabeth Winstead in a bunker in 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016). Then came Trumbo (2015), The Monuments Men (2014), Patriots Day (2016), Kong: Skull Island (2017), Atomic Blonde (2017) and, this year, the President of the United States in Digger, the Alejandro González Iñárritu satire starring Tom Cruise. He has never been nominated for an Oscar, which surprises almost everyone except him.

New Orleans, drink and 200 pounds

He married Anna Beth Hartzog in 1989 and they have a daughter, Molly, born the following year. They have lived for decades in the Garden District of New Orleans, in a house he bought from the musician Trent Reznor, and the city is bound up with his life closely enough that he took 'Treme' almost as a personal matter.

He drank heavily for years and has talked about it without decoration: he stopped in 2007, at 55, by which point alcohol had taken away even his wish to act. Food then took the bottle's place.

In an interview with 'The New Yorker' published in October 2026 he explained that he had been eating "alcoholically", that he weighed close to 400 pounds before surgery and that he has lost around 200 since. The less appealing side came up as well: he turned anaemic and is cold all the time now. At seventy-four he is still working, which seems to be the only thing that genuinely holds his interest.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for John Goodman is Sweet Dreams (1985); in all, 52 films and 11 TV shows over 41 years. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is Monsters, Inc. (2001), with 135 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2010s, with 33 titles. The person they have worked with most is Steve Buscemi, on 5 films, among them Monsters, Inc. and Monsters University.