Jamie Foxx: underestimated from the start, he always had something special up his sleeve. Now with his eye-opening performance as Ray Charles in a new film on the life of the late music legend, the wise-cracking funny man is getting serious—and the world is taking notice. Elvis Mitchell gets the lowdown on challenging the status quo from the movies' newest big leaguer

What's surprising about Jamie Foxx is the gravity of his physical presence. His Mack diesel muscularity isn't always apparent in his work, which is the sign of a true actor. That's partially because he literally expands and contracts to fit the role. He puffed up for the Poppin' Fresh-size Drew "Bundini" Brown in Michael Mann's Ali [2001], turned that pillowy mass into a wall of muscle to play death-row inmate Stan "Tookie" Williams in the FX Network biopic Redemption, and then spun around and burned himself down to sheer will for the lean, fidgety Ray Charles in his latest film, Taylor Hackford's Ray. In between, he sandwiched the precise cab driver Max for his second project with Mann, last summer's Collateral. The 36-year-old actor is also a man of many facets, a Texan kid who grew up in the rural town of Terrell (population: 14,400) in a portion of the Lone Star State where race remains an issue, and was driven enough to earn a music scholarship to International University in San Diego to train as a classical pianist. That path led him to a stint on In Living Color, and he followed that with The Jamie Foxx Show, a sitcom that he stretched to include variety-show staging. The movies were just a matter of time for Foxx--only he knows what's next.

DATE: JUNE 26, 2004

ELVIS MITCHELL: You started out doing sketch comedy on In Living Color, and it seems like, as an actor, you use a lot of the same tools you would use to create sketch characters. You've played a lot of outgoing characters, like Bundini Brown in Ali, who say the stuff that nobody in his right mind would say.

JAMIE FOXX: What you do is you take those characters and all of that information and you make it a nuance. How a character like Bundini orders his food, how he talks to his kids, how he gets angry but doesn't shout at you--those are the things that you want to chop up and truncate a little bit. On TV you're trying to take up space. You have to create something in a vacuum. But in a movie you need to be small. When I saw myself in my first movie, I was like, "What the fuck is going on?" I was just too animated. I played this kid that was working for a toy company, and I was like, [raises voice] "Yo, man! I'm taking out the trash!" Just way too big. So I said, "Damn, I'm really not that good. Maybe I shouldn't be here." Then I started watching people that do it well. I watched Denzel Washington. I watched Laurence Fishburne. I watched Al Pacino. I learned how to act from watching movies.

EM: Tell me about the first time you saw In Living Color.

JF: Oh, my God. It was great. They were rock stars. I had to turn the TV off because I was like, "It's killing me that I'm not on this show! I can't watch it!" They were doing such jazz. Then when I got on the show, Keenen Ivory Wayans blew my mind. He was definitely the principal and I was definitely the student, and he definitely let me know that. But I needed that because I was wild--showing up, you know, with the same clothes I had on the day before. He was like, "Foxx, what are you doing?" And I'd be like, "I'm just so happy to be on TV! You know, all these people know me!" After that, my whole life changed. I got a convertible, too. I was riding around, head over the fucking windshield, man.

EM: Did you go deposit your first check?

JF: I never deposited my check. I used to cash my check and put it right in my pocket. I'd be walking around with $13,000 in my pocket, country as hell. I had checks in my closet, man, that I never even cashed. I remember going through my closet one time and finding a check for $48,000. I was nuts.

EM: What about the first time you went back home after you had one of those big rolls of cash in your pocket? I know you went home to show that money off.

JF: I drove my car back to Texas. It was a British car, a 1979 Triumph TR7, and the only good year that that car had was in 1979. So I drove it all the way to Texas, but I painted over the insignia, so nobody knew what kind of car it was. They were like, "Is that a Ferrari?" And I'd say, "Yes, yes--it's a baby Ferrari!" [both laugh]

EM: HOW did you learn to do sketch comedy?

JF: Sketch comedy came natural, just from being a high school kid. I always used to be funny around my friends, but then I started working with all these guys at In Living Color, like Keenen, Damon [Wayans], and Jim [Carrey]. I watched first before I said anything. I said to myself, "Why waste all of my jokes trying to be funny with these guys? Because I'll never be as funny as them--they're the ones that are hot." So I would wait until we did the actual sketch to unleash everything.

EM: So you didn't leave it in the rehearsal.

JF: Yeah. Sometimes you've just got to shut up.

EM: Was that a hard lesson to learn?

JF: Way hard, because I like to talk, man. But I learned that from them because they used to bust my balls. It was like being hazed in a fraternity. I just let them all get it in because for me, it's about learning. If you just be quiet for a minute, you'll get the whole pulse of L.A. I came to L.A. to work. I was working at Thom McCann, making a couple of bucks, and I did what I thought I was supposed to do. But I see guys around me who have been trying to make it in this business for 15 years. You know why they can't? Because the sun is too nice and there are too many people by the pool. You just have to hope that the decisions you're making are going to push you--not in front of other people, because it's not a race, but to do great work. It's always good to be stealthy about it because then you don't have the pressure.