Ladies and Gentleman: This is Ray Charles

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Posted In: Entertainment

NEW YORK- Knocking around Los Angeles comedy clubs early in his stand-up career, Jamie Foxx convulsed audiences with an impersonation of a head-bobbing, shoulder-rocking Ray Charles rasping “The Brady Bunch Theme.”

But slipping into Charles’ skin for “Ray,” a biopic of the musical revolutionary who married gospel with rock, and R&B with country, required other means.

Mimicry, Foxx explains, is an inventory of physical and vocal tics. “But to play Ray, I had to find the place where he was still and quiet,” he says, holding forth in a hotel suite and popping M&Ms as if they were vitamins.

He got into the “Ray zone” by wearing prosthetics on his eyes that rendered him as sightless as his subject, and forced him to depend more on his hearing. “Ray saw with his ears,” Foxx observes of the singer, who died in June.

In musical terms, Foxx found Charles between the notes. In “Ray,” he internalizes him to the point of incarnating him. And he plays it not as a man who triumphed over disability, but as one who emphasized his ability. This isn’t an actor playing Ray: Ladies and gentlemen, this is Ray Charles.

Foxx’s electrifying turn as the blind artist who did not recognize the boundaries between musical genres- just as he did not recognize those between black and white in segregated America- looks like the one to beat at February’s Academy Awards.

Actors always tell you how playing a special part has changed them as an artist. But Foxx, 36, tells you the specifics. Playing Charles transformed him not only as an actor, but as a man. “I listen differently now,” he says.

To hear Foxx tell it, he’s been altered by experiencing how the blind are also colorblind. “When you can’t see, you don’t care who takes you to the bathroom, walks you to the car, sits next to you on the bus.”

“Before we made the movie, Ray’s music, for me, was like oxygen,” says the actor, who lip-synchs in the movie to Charles’ vocals. “I took it for granted.”

Only when Foxx understood the obstacles Charles endured as a black man in the Jim Crow South, and as a blind man exploited by some sighted hustlers, did the music resonate. “What Ray taught me is that when you rid yourself of excuses, there’s nothing you can’t do.”

Foxx’s seamless transformation into Charles is the latest stage in his metamorphosis from small-screen comic to big-screen drama king. Could be that he gets a second Oscar nod this year, a supporting bid for the role of Max, the honorable cabbie who picks up the wrong fare in “Collateral.”

A Hollywood axiom is that funny means money and serious means awards. Foxx’s film path defies half of that conventional wisdom.

In the decade since he left television’s “In Living Color,” neither his self-titled 1996 WB sitcom nor his appearances in film raunchfests such as “Booty Call” (1997) have earned him the money or the acclaim of his performances as the full-of-himself quarterback Willie Beamen in “Any Given Sunday” (1999), as cornerman “Bundini” Brown in “Ali” (2001) or as Max the hack in “Collateral.”

In those features, Foxx not only stood his ground opposite the formidable Al Pacino, Will Smith and Tom Cruise, he elevated their games. Still, the guy with the rep as the secret sauce for Hollywood’s prime cuts had never before “Ray” carried a movie on his own.

“You live and die by the person who plays the role in a biopic,” says film director Taylor Hackford, who gestated the “Ray” screenplay for 15 years before financing came through.

When Hackford approached Foxx, the filmmaker had no idea he was tapping an accomplished pianist. Not only had Foxx, born Eric Bishop in Terrell, Texas, played for his church choir growing up, but in 1986 he won a classical-piano scholarship to U.S. International University in San Diego. (Bishop rechristened himself Jamie Foxx the following year, when he heard that comedy-club bookers were looking for women. On open-mike night, the gender-neutral name helped.)

Before Hackford closed the deal, he sought Charles’ blessing. When the music icon and the iconoclastic actor met at Charles’ L.A. studio, Charles invited Foxx to the adjoining piano, taking his measure by jamming the blues. Then the music man stunned the actor by taking a U-turn into a complex Thelonious Monk composition, testing Foxx.

Though the actor couldn’t exactly keep up, he managed to “stay on the mechanical bull” of Charles’ challenge. And after a few tries Foxx finally nailed the Monk riff. “Got it, Jamie?” Charles teased. “It’s right under your fingertips.”

“Once Ray anointed Jamie,” says Hackford, in a separate interview, “I saw him grow from his regular height to 10 feet.”

To take on the role, the supremely disciplined Foxx shrank from his normal weight of 190 to 156 so he would look even more like the wiry musician.

Make no mistake, Foxx is no method actor who lived Ray all day and night. Actress “CCH Pounder taught me character is like a coat,” Foxx says. “Put it on when you’re working, hang