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

EM: Was there a danger in casting it the "wrong" black Hollywood way?

JF: Of course. Come on, man. You know that!

EM: I'm just a trained journalist asking a black man some questions.

JF: Here's the thing: If you watch a movie and you see an actor like Larenz Tate, you're going to go, "Well, that's my boy right there." But if you see a movie, and you see a Kadeem Hardison, it's a different flow because you go, "Okay, the machine must have been working in that situation because of the choice." Nothing against either one of them, but if you're really going to get that internal black thing [in a film], then there are certain sources you pick from. And in this movie, we had to be careful not to cast it wrong, because then we wouldn't get that. To me, an actor like Clifton Powell, who plays Ray's manager, is what the movie needed. Actors like Harry Lennix, Bokeem Woodbine, Regina King [who are all in the film]--they are the ones that are going to give us what we need. When they come onscreen, it isn't going to be like, "Why is he in it?" or "Why is she in it?" Taylor Hackford sat back and said, "Okay, I'm going to trust you on this." So I said, "All right, I'm going to trust you," and that's where you see the black and the white transcend color for the art of making a movie. Everybody had to be involved because we had to protect that character. The thing that got me about Ray Charles was that because he was blind, he had to take your word for everything. So with the racial thing, when you would talk to him about different musicians, he'd say, "Hey, man, it don't matter to me." There is a part in the movie where he walks into a country bar, and they say to him, "We don't want this N-word. What makes you think you can play country, son?" So Ray says, "Because I like the stories. I like what you guys talk about." And Ray sat down, he played the music, and he got the country-western players to come around. Ray didn't have that luxury of deciding if someone could sing something just because of personal skin color. He graded each person, he said, individually, and then at the end of the day, he also loved his collard greens and his pork chops. We could have just not paid any attention to anything like that in the movie, but we did.

EM: Do you remember first meeting Ray?

JF: Yeah. I asked everyone, "What should I know about Ray Charles?" because when I met Muhammad Ali, I was really nervous. Ali walked into the room and stumbled a little bit, and I went to go catch him. And everyone said, "No! No! No! It's cool!" I felt embarrassed, and Will Smith was like, "Oh, man, what you doing? Are you Superman? Are you going to save him?" And I was like, "I just didn't know--I thought he was falling." So, when I met Ray, they said, "Ray knows this room like the back of his hand. Don't you get up. Don't move a muscle." So Ray comes in, and the first thing he does is he trips over a cord. And I just sat there and was like, "Man, I should do nothing?" And when Ray catches himself he says, [in Charles's voice] "Now, who the hell put this cord down here like this?" [laughs] He meets me, shakes my hand, and says, [in Charles's voice] "You know, Jamie, the one thing, man, is can you play the blues? Play the blues with me!" And he starts immediately, on tandem pianos, playing the blues with me. He says, "The kid's got it." But I did hit a couple of wrong notes, and he said, "Why'd you hit that note, man? You hit the G-sharp as opposed to just a regular G. Just lay right on the G." And then I saw that by doing what he said, all of a sudden I was able to catch up to him, and that was his genius at work. So we played again, and I made sure I hit the right note. I said, "This is going to be a fun project." Ray gave us his blessing.