John Goodman

John Goodman (born June 20, 1952, Affton, Missouri, U.S.) is an American actor who is perhaps best known for his long-running role as Dan Conner in the television series Roseanne (1988–97; 2018) and The Connors (2018–25). Goodman also appeared in a number of notable movies, including Barton Fink (1991), The Big Lebowski (1998), and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2020), all of which were directed by the Coen brothers. Other prominent films include 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) and Argo (2013). Goodman’s imposing physical stature often garnered him roles playing over-the-top, larger-than-life figures.

Early career and Roseanne

Goodman attended Southwest Missouri State University on a football scholarship. An injury, however, ended his chances of a football career, and he began studying drama. After graduating in 1975, he moved to New York City to pursue acting jobs. He took roles in tiny dinner theaters and in television commercials before being cast in the Broadway production of Loose Ends in 1979. A few years later he again performed on Broadway in Big River (1985) as Huck Finn’s father, the role for which he first received critical attention.

Goodman began to regularly appear in films in the early 1980s, and in 1987 he played an escaped convict in the Coen brothers’ quirky comedy Raising Arizona. His breakthrough, however, came when he was cast as the all-American blue-collar family man in the hit comedy television series Roseanne. His performances in this role earned him seven Emmy Award nominations and a Golden Globe Award (1993).

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Film career

During his successful stint on Roseanne, Goodman’s movie career also began to take off. He played the husband of a comedian in Punchline (1988) and a pilot who fights forest fires opposite Richard Dreyfuss in Always (1989). In the 1990s Goodman appeared in more than 20 movies, including The Babe (1992), in which he starred as baseball legend Babe Ruth, and The Flintstones (1994), a remake of the classic cartoon.

He reteamed with the Coen brothers for Barton Fink (1991); The Big Lebowski (1998), in which he costarred with Jeff Bridges and Steve Buscemi, portraying a Vietnam War veteran still reliving the past; and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), starring opposite George Clooney as a crooked Bible salesman in 1930s Mississippi.

Goodman played a father who is nervous about his daughter’s move to New York City in Coyote Ugly (2000) and a detective in One Night at McCool’s (2001). Subsequent supporting roles included the manager of singer Bobby Darin in the biopic Beyond the Sea (2004), a corrupt congressman in the comedy Evan Almighty (2007), and a baseball executive in the drama Trouble with the Curve (2012). Goodman also appeared in two consecutive winners of the Academy Award for best picture, both times as Hollywood industry figures; he portrayed a studio mogul in The Artist (2011) and a real-life makeup artist enlisted in a CIA operation in Argo (2012).

In 2013 Goodman was featured as a villainous mobster in the freewheeling comedy The Hangover Part III and as a caustic heroin-addicted jazz musician in the Coen brothers’ drama Inside Llewyn Davis. He then costarred in The Monuments Men (2014), which fictionalized Allied efforts to recover art stolen by the Nazis during World War II, and in The Gambler (2014), a remake of a 1974 drama about a man with a gambling problem.

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His other movies during this period include Trumbo, a biopic about blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (2015); the comedy Love the Coopers (2015); the horror film 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016); and Patriots Day (2016), about the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013. In 2017 Goodman appeared in the action thrillers Kong: Skull Island,e Once Upon a Time in Venice, and Atomic Blonde. His later movies include Captive State (2019), in which aliens have colonized Earth and face a resistance movement, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s bleak comedy Digger, in which he played the U.S. president.

In addition, Goodman’s easily recognizable voice could be heard in numerous animated films, among them The Emperor’s New Groove (2000), Bee Movie (2007), and The Princess and the Frog (2009), as well as the Pixar hit Monsters, Inc. (2001) and its sequel Monsters University (2013).

Other TV work, including The Conners

Goodman continued to appear on television in the 21st century. He starred in the sitcom Center of the Universe (2004–05) and provided the voice of a lion in the animated Father of the Pride (2004–05). In 2010–11 he appeared on the HBO series Treme, a drama set in New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina, and he joined the cast of the legal drama Damages for its 2011 season. Goodman also had a featured role in the HBO television movie You Don’t Know Jack (2010), which centered on Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a vocal supporter of physician-assisted suicide. He returned to Broadway in a 2009 production of Waiting for Godot and later starred in The Front Page (2016–17).

In 2018 Goodman reprised his role as Dan Conner in the nine-episode revival of Roseanne, which visited the working-class family 20 years after the original series had ended. The show was a ratings success, but an 11th season was canceled by its network, ABC, after star Roseanne Barr posted a racist tweet that spring. A retooled version of the show without Barr premiered in the fall as The Conners (2018–25), shifting its focus from the matriarch to Goodman and the rest of the supporting cast. During this time he also starred in The Righteous Gemstones (2019–25), a comedy series about a family of televangelists.