Tag — Jamie Foxx

Oscar winner Jamie Foxx has the incredible ability to morph into any character that he portrays in a film.  After his star performance as Ray Charles, Hollywood began to take this method actor a lot more seriously. In preparing for the role as Ray Charles, Jamie actually had prosthetic eyelids glued over his eyes for days at a time in order to understand how it felt to be blind.

His most recent role as a homeless paranoid schizophrenic required him to lose approximately 18 pounds.  That isn’t a whole lot of weight, however, in Jamie’s case it took a toll on his mind as he found himself getting lost in the character he was portraying.  Midway through filming he started seeing a psychiatrist where he explored some deep-seated issues from his personal past and fear of mental illness.  When Jamie was just 18 years old he was attending a college party and his cocktail was unknowingly spiked with the hallucinogenic drug PCP. He suffered for a long time as he was paranoid he was losing his mind and also because he would have PCP flashbacks months and years later.  He said,

“I think it was to do with me losing weight for one thing. I allowed myself to go back to my high-school weight, and like my doctor said, when you lose weight it can make your mind feel vague sometimes – and the PCP is in your DNA, it’s in the fatty tissue, and as you lose weight it ignites.”

The Soloist, the true story of Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, a music prodigy who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia will be out in theaters in the fall.