Cuba Gooding Jr Interview, Daddy Day Camp

Armed with no knowledge of the great outdoors, a dilapidated facility, and a motley group of campers, it doesn’t take long before things get out of control. Up against threats of foreclosure and declining enrollment, Charlie is forced to call on his estranged father, Col. Buck Hinton (Richard Gant) to help bring the camp together and teach everyone about teamwork, perseverance and the power of forgiveness.

Cuba Gooding, Jr. is best known for his Academy Award winning portrayal of the charmingly arrogant professional football player Rod Tidwell in "Jerry Maguire.” Starring opposite Tom Cruise in the Cameron Crowe-directed film, Gooding solidified his position as one of Hollywood’s most talented actors.

Gooding is a fabulous person and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us about his experience starring in "Daddy Day Camp” as well as his upcoming projects including the much anticipated "American Gangster” directed by Ridley Scott:

Q: Can you tell us about your day camp experience? Have you ever done that?

CUBA: I never actually as a kid went camping. I went to the Raiders Pro Football camp and that was the extent of it. Now I’ve done more camping as an adult that I ever did in my entire life. That’s why I wasn’t looking to do a sequel to one of my movies, let alone Eddie Murphy’s movie, and I read this script and it was like, "Yeah, they pretty much hit it on the head.” My two boys, 10 and 12, we just dropped them off at camp yesterday.

Q: Was it their first time there?

CUBA: No, no, no. They go every year. [Laughs] They go every year.

Q: They like it, right?

CUBA: They love it, they love it, and it’s great ‘cause you always get the same thing. They’re excited to go the night before. They don’t sleep. They get on the bus. They drive up there. They call crying. "Oh, this is a mistake.” Right? Then we get the first couple of weepy postcards and then you don’t hear from them. So you think "Uh oh.” And then they show up and they’re dirty and smelly because they forgot to shower the entire two weeks and they’re like, "The best time ever. Can’t wait ‘til next year.” Every year it’s the same thing and it’s great because it is a bit of adult responsibilities. They have to fend for themselves, but it’s great. It’s great. It really is. And then my youngest boy is a Boy Scout. I’ve been the chaperone on a couple of those camping excursions.

Q: Is it a vacation for you to be with other kids?

CUBA: [Laughs] Well yeah, two weeks, you got that right. Grown-up camp.

Q: Was it easy working with a whole bunch of little kids?

CUBA: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I’m like the grandparent. I come get them heated up and then I split to my trailer and they got to figure out how to calm them down and it’s great. The only trick I think was my off camera dialogue because the kids didn’t really get that. I mean I’d be saying serious stuff like "You know, we’re a family. We’re a team.” And the kids like yawning and picking his nose and pinching the other one.

Q: How would you compare working with kids and working with Denzel Washington or Russell Crowe?

CUBA: [Laughs] Some big kids there too, you know. Some big kids, man.

Q: Did you have fun also with them or was it more serious acting?

CUBA: Well American Gangster was awesome. It was one of those opportunities where you get to work with a master craftsman, Ridley Scott, and have Jordan and Gretzky as your wingmen. You know what I mean? You guys are just doing your thing so I’ll be excited to see that movie. I can’t wait to see because it was an amazing experience. I played Nicky Barnes who was one of the original heroin pimps in the 70s that brought all of that shit to Harlem.

Q: We’ll be seeing it in two weeks.

CUBA: Okay. Well then you tell me how it was.

Q: Did you do American Gangster before Daddy Day Care and if so, was that difficult?

CUBA: I did American Gangster before. I mean look at my career, bro. You know this isn’t the first film in my career. You’ve seen Snow Dogs. You’ve seen Rat Race. You’ve seen Shadowboxer. You know, I started in theater doing situations where I was having very different plays in the morning and very different plays at night going from comedy to drama. I mean that’s the gig for me.

Q: Do you have a preference?

CUBA: No. I think if anything I like to find the comedy within the dramatic pieces and find the lighter sides in the emotional pieces. To me, when they come together, that fusion is what is the drug I think.

Q: So when you get to do something like Daddy Day Camp, do you just go wild?

CUBA: Oh yeah.

Q: There’s no limit to how broad you can be?

CUBA: No. There’s limits within the context of the character. You don’t want to make the scene bananas on bananas. No, you definitely want to find a nice balance but there’s an opportunity to be more broad than say something like An American Gangster. My character in that is pretty flamboyant too but it’s a different vein than this one.

Q: What are your criteria when you’re considering what project to take? What do you look for?

CUBA: You know I had to ask myself that because I got a lot of people saying the same kind of conversations. Why do you go back and forth? There’s an emotional through line to a lot of my characters even though it’s comedy or drama. If you look at Boyz in the Hood obviously there was a slice of life that people weren’t exposed to but you could see my character was the emotional -- he was the one affected the most by it. If you look at Men of Honor, it’s the same thing. It’s like Carl Brashear had done so much but emotionally the audience had to connect him. If you look at Shadowboxer, I was a hit man who was supposed to be cold but yet he reconnected with his emotions.

Q: Can you tell us how you get into character? What’s your process?

CUBA: The first thing I try to do is understand who I think this guy is before I do any of the research and I get my impressions of him. And then I do my research and then I kind of compare notes about my first impression reading the material and the guy that I think that I’ve found and then I start to build the physicality of the character from the haircut up. I cut my own hair for all my movies and work very closely with the wardrobe person especially like in American Gangster. You’ll understand that when you see it. And then there’s a walk. You know like Jerry Maguire, there was a very specific walk that I had to have for him. You kind of do the private investigator on these different aspects of the character’s personality.

Q: A lot of actors say they like to watch people just to take stuff from them. Do you do that?

CUBA: Oh, absolutely.

Q: Can you give me one example?

CUBA: Well the best actors I think are the ones that give the best impersonations. You know I just did this movie [called] Linewatch that Kevin Bray directed and one of the characters in it is Evan Ross. He’s Diana Ross’s son. Sweet kid, beautiful kid, master impersonator. Master impersonator. He’s going to be one of the great actors of our time. I think so. And he’s just so young right now so you haven’t seen a lot of his work. He does a Terrence Howard impersonation that is scary. It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. It really is.

Q: He was good in that movie with Terrence too.

CUBA: Pride, right? Yeah, he might have been the best thing about it.

Q: What was the bonding process between you and your character’s son? This kid was brilliant.

CUBA: Right.

Q: At first he hated you because you hated your dad.

CUBA: Right.

Q: And then at the end …

CUBA: We mirrored each other.

Q: All three of you guys came back together.

CUBA: Yeah. That was great. You know the best thing I always say when you’re casting to directors, because they always say "Well, who do you like?” And I say, "You go with the actor.” You gotta go with the actor and that was one instance where we had a brilliant actor. Obviously [with] his father being Todd Bridges, he was exposed to a lot of it, but he’s just so in tune, so open to any experience. You know it’s so easy for us to get pompous as film actors. TV actors have this thing where people treat them like they grew up with them because they see them so they’re all over them. So you can seem them getting jaded real quick. But film actors, people don’t really know so they stay aloof. Like I can walk to the mall now and every once and a while somebody says, ‘Hey, you know, show me the money” or anything.

Q: That happens?

CUBA: A lot. [Laughs] But for the most part people will know it’s me and ignore me and even act like they ignore me because they want whatever, whatever it is, and so I think it’s our job as film actors to stay open to any little embarrassment in life, you know. It’s easy I think to get an image of yourself and protect that image and just be seen as somebody who can do the Men of Honors and the American Gangsters. It’s another thing just junk like that [points to Daddy Day Care poster where he’s featured prominently]. I mean I saw that poster and I was scared. I was like, "What the hell?!” I remember that day when we did that shoot. It was all in my character’s psyche so you have to allow these expressions to come forward.

Q: Did you have to suppress Cuba the parent versus Cuba the actor when you were with these children?

CUBA: Oh yeah. Absolutely. Cuba the parent absolutely was… You know it’s funny because if you’ve ever been to my house, I have a hockey rink, a batting cage, a sunken trampoline, boxing. We have everything on our property and every weekend all the kids come to our house and it’s just like romper room and it is. A lot of times when kids have to govern themselves, there’s a certain form of self awareness that they get and a certain self confidence that they get as long as you’re setting certain out of perimeter guidelines to them. You let them govern each other. I think it makes them grow up more aware.

Q: Are you the good cop or the bad cop?

CUBA: Oh, I’m the bad cop. My wife’s the good cop. Yeah.

Q: Those expressions you use… I mean I’ve tried to do them in the mirror myself.

CUBA: [Laughs] You shouldn’t do that and handle heavy machinery.

Q: You have a different expression for every situation. An audience can tell the emotion of the film by the expression on your face. Where does that come from?

CUBA: It’s weird. Like I said to somebody else, it’s like a musician practices a certain riff until he gets it perfect and then it’s almost seamless. He does it in the studio, and the painter paints on these canvases, but we practice on screen. You know what I mean? We have to be invited to practice so a lot of the times through those series of takes there will be a moment that the director likes and he puts out there so you know, you’re seeing me and my process. It’s very different in Shadowboxer. It was this role. It was this performance. It was this situation.

Q: What was going on the day you shot that poster?

CUBA: Just what you see there. We were all having a good time, there was music playing, and there were a couple of different setups for us to do. And it was so funny, because half the kids were the kids in there, and the other half were like stand-in kids. And again, another group of kids, a new audience, and we just had a good time.

Q: And what scene was the most fun for you to shoot?

CUBA: Probably the camping stuff when the tent gets destroyed and the fart, with the fly, and all that stuff. That was great because we were really camping. We were about two hours outside of Park City, Utah in the middle of nowhere, and just having a ball, every day for about a week, a week and a half doing that scene.

Q: You weren't in hotels?

CUBA: Oh, I was! I went to my hotel!

Q: Was your family with you?

CUBA: Yeah, they came down. Yeah. Yeah. But the kids were all...I believe they all either stayed in the campsite or they went back to the hotel to sleep and then came back the first thing in the morning and then just lived in this camp area.

Q: Are any of your kids in this movie?

CUBA: No. No.

Q: Have you ever considered that?

CUBA: No.

Q: Why not?

CUBA: It's an adult responsibility to be an actor. It really is. I mean, I would be horrified. My kid's done some...Like we have a little girl, she'll be 2 in October. She says some of the sassiest things. You can't help but laugh. Now what if somebody saw one of those things and made her famous because of that? Now she's an adult, she's got an album out, she's going to the clubs, and she's like, "Well, I've been this way my whole life and I accept it." I mean, what confusion can these people take from that? They have to grow up and become adults first, I think. And then all of this praise and money and adult responsibility, they can do that.

Q: You can get your kid in a movie, like Will Smith...

CUBA: Oh, oh, Will Smith. No, Will Smith, it works for him. I just...it don't work for me.

Q: But your parents were entertainers, so it was a natural progression for you to be an entertainer...

CUBA: That's right. And my kids want to act, in the worst way.

Q: Really?

CUBA: Oh, yeah. I tell them keep studying, and then when they get older, I'll support them. But right now, just be kids.

Q: Well, what about the kids you needed for this movie?

CUBA: You know, it's always, what I even tell the parents...I say you can be as supportive as you can with these kids, but you gotta remember that there is a personal life that they have to pay attention to. They have to really...There's so much stuff. Hollywood isn't about restraint, it's about excess, and you're exposing your kids to this excess. So who's going to be the governor if you're not? I mean, the parents has to be. I'm not saying that none of these parents are governing them, because they have their relationship with their kids. I'm saying I know how I would be, and I don't want my kids to have that much freedom, you know? They need to just enjoy life, express life, be exposed to life, understand what life lessons are, morals are, and then make their own decisions having been informed of the life lessons that they need to be informed in.

Q: Do you spoil your kids?

CUBA: The little girl's spoiled a little bit. [Laughs] She's so spoiled! Because she's so cute. She's got two big brothers, a dad who travels a lot, so when he's there, all he wants to do is...She stays on my shoulder. I threw my back out, right, because she was on my shoulder for eight hours. I didn't even realize it. I would just lean against the wall when I got tired. And she would fall asleep on there, hold my head, and kind of pull my face around and just be sitting up there, do you know what I mean? [Laughs] But no acting.

Q: Were these kids really excited about camping out? You said they were back by dawn.

CUBA: Yeah, really, really excited. It's the whole process. You know, most of these kids...I mean, that's the wonderful thing about this movie. And I know I've said this all day, but we weren't looking to make a sequel. We weren't looking to do anything. If anything, we were making a remake with a re-imagined cast and conceptualization. The only thing that we stayed true to was the Daddy Day theme of a father connecting with his children. But most of these kids were just first time actors. You know, found in the middle of small towns.

Q: A lot of your critics say you haven't had an Oscar-worthy role since Jerry Maguire. How do you respond to that?

CUBA: Radio. Men of Honor. Shadowboxer. I mean, I see movies that I'm just as proud of, if not prouder than that.

Q: What about something like American Gangster? Are you excited about that?

CUBA: Yes, because you get to work with Ridley Scott. I mean, I'm such a huge Ridley fan, I would have done a day's part on that movie.

Q: What about working with Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington?

CUBA: Well, I didn't have any scenes with Russell. All my scenes were with Denzel. So I still have yet to work with Russell.

Q: Have you met him at least?

CUBA: No, I've never met. No.

Q: Will we see you in another Singleton movie?

CUBA: I hope so. Yeah, I hope so.

Q: Can you compare and contrast working with Fred Savage vs. Ridley Scott?

CUBA: Well, it's funny because they both have obviously been trained in film, cinema. Ridley probably 50 years ago, and Fred just recently in the past 10 years. And Fred's process is steeped in children's cinema. You know, be it through his film school experiences or be it the children's television shows. So when I met with Fred for this project, I knew how well versed he was on how to handle the kids, and how to do the material, his knowledge of the material. But it was more of an influence, my personal influence, on his vision that was more a collaborative thing. Whereas Ridley Scott, it's like working with Yoda. I mean, there was one scene where it's just a really violent scene, a real aggressive scene, and Denzel and I were in a competition. And something wasn't working. I go, "Listen, if we..." And I kind of rattled off real quick. And everybody's kind of shaking their head, and Ridley goes, "You know, I have done this before." [Laughs] It's like, "That's right! Okay. So what do you want us to do?" [Laughs] You know what I mean? So yeah, very night and day. And again, I'm blessed to be in both those positions.

Q: What was the best time of your career so far?

CUBA: Uhhh...You know, I've had so many wonderful experiences. I went on a private jet through Europe with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. I was at a convention for military men weeping and standing next to Carl Brashear on the U.S.S. Arizona. I was in Bulgaria with Ray Liotta on this movie, Hero Wanted.

Q: Bulgaria? That was fun?

CUBA: It was amazing. Culturally, it was something I've never been exposed to my entire life, and it was amazing. So I've had so many wonderful experiences, I don't know which one's the favorite yet.

Q: If you weren't an actor, what would you be? A musician, perhaps?

CUBA: Well, you know, my father would like to think so. But I don't know. I just...Something to do with people. Either be a defense attorney or a psychiatrist of some kind, I think.

Q: Do you still breakdance?

CUBA: [laughs] Not well. Every once in a while, my kids talk me into showing them a windmill or a backspin or something.

Q: Have you done anything with your brother?

CUBA: I haven't yet. I tried to get him in this one movie that I just finished for Kevin Bray, this thing called Linewatch, about the border patrol officers. And he got booked in a movie called Bolden, which is a big jazz movie, which I'm excited to see.

Q: He's got a nice personality like you. Is that the way you guys were brought up?

CUBA: Maybe. Maybe. Who knows? I don't know. I can't give it a name, but yeah, I'd love to work with Omar. I'd love to work with him.

Q: Do you need to work? Some actors take time off between projects.

CUBA: Well, I took two years off between Shadowboxer and Radio. But then since Shadowboxer, I've done probably a series of 12 films.

Q: Do you need to be busy?

CUBA: I don't know if I need it. I don't know if I need it, but I do need some form of artistic outlet. I need something. You know, I'm constantly...Somebody was saying, "What do you have on your TiVo?" And I'm watching the Biography Channel. The A&E biographies where it's showing all the history of people and inventions and things, and that informs me as far as human behavior. So that again, that's working.

Q: Why two years off?

CUBA: Well, I fired my agents and my managers and just said, "That's it, I don't want to do anything more with the business." And I kind of sat there. You know, I had given an interview saying I wasn't doing comedies anymore. [Laughs] I mean, I was losing it, man! I had a moment! [Laughs]

Q: Did you think at one point, "I'm not going to come back? I'm going to leave LA?"

CUBA: No, never like...Because remember, I was raised in LA. I met my wife at North Hollywood High School. So I knew if anything, I was going to have to get a job of some kind. And I said, "Who knows what it'll be, but I just can't go on this path in my career," is the statement I was trying to make. And you know what? I think it was a real period of growth for me, because I really had to reflect on what God's purpose was for me, and what was my ability, you know? And maybe that's a little bit of answer to your question about the drama and the comedy. Because I think I'm going to stop worrying about what I do better or what like better and just be.

Q: What do you have coming up next?

CUBA: Well, funny, I know I've talked about a few projects between American Gangster, Hero Wanted, and Linewatch, but I am producing and co-starring with Spencer Breslin in a Napoleon Dynamite-esque comedy. He plays a 12-year-old boy with male pattern baldness in an elementary school, and I'm the janitor that he befriends. And it's this quirky relationship with these two guys. And it's called Harold. They're on their second week, and they're waiting for me to get there on Saturday to film.

Q: Where is that shooting?

CUBA: Manhattan.

"Daddy Day Camp” opens in theaters on August 8^th.