John Goodman says he was in a 'bad place' while making Martin Scorsese's 'Bringing Out the Dead': 'I wasted a great opportunity'
John Goodman says he was in a "bad place" making "Bringing Out the Dead."
His daughter also had a health scare visiting him on set.
"I feel I wasted a great opportunity," he told Business Insider looking back on the movie.
Out of the countless memorable movie roles John Goodman has had over his career, there's one where he feels he blew it.
In Martin Scorsese's slow-burn 1999 drama "Bringing Out the Dead," Goodman and Nicolas Cage play paramedics working the night shift in New York City. Looking back on the experience 25 years later, the actor has his regrets.
"I was in a bad place," Goodman told Business Insider in his interview for our "Role Play" series.
Goodman wouldn't go into specifics other than to say that he was "in a bad place mentally." On top of that, the actor said his daughter, who was 9 at the time, became ill in the middle of production.
"My wife brought my daughter up for the shoot and she got appendicitis," he said. "I got home from work at about six in the morning. She had been up all night. We brought a doctor in. We had to get her to a hospital in midday Manhattan and it was impossible. I was not getting a lot of sleep. Dan Aykroyd and his family took care of my daughter for a while when I was working."
Goodman added, "I wish I would have been present for the film because I feel I wasted a great opportunity."
Goodman hasn't been cast in one of Scorsese's movies since. Does he think he burned a bridge?
"I'm not worried about that," Goodman responded.
However, Goodman, 71, said there were some positives of making the movie: he got to hang out in the New York City neighborhood he used to live in and he got to work with Nicolas Cage again after the two starred in the Coen Brothers' 1987 movie "Raising Arizona."
"He's certainly his own man," Goodman said of Cage. "He's just filled with a lot of energy and ideas."
Goodman currently can be seen on the sixth season of "The Conners."
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