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: How much piano do you play in the movie?

JF: I didn't have to play whole songs, but I had to know how so they could hold me in the frame. If you're not playing the right notes, then they have to cut to your hands.

EM: It was really important for you to be seen playing the songs without cutting to your hands or your face.

JF: Because that would make it look hokey. We had to get the real Ray Charles. I know that everyone was saying, "Oh, man, what is he doing? Jamie done dropped a lot of weight. Is he smoking?" [both laugh] But you couldn't have muscle in the 1940s and 1950s because back then, people didn't lift weights. The whole time Ray's talking, he's playing music. He's constantly playing notes. Ray said, "Music is going on in my head all the time, so I'm a conveyor belt of music, all the time, every day," so we had to implement that into the character, too.

EM: So then how do you use music when you play a character like Max in Collateral?

JF: Well, I developed that character off a friend of mine named Bentley Kyle Evans. Bentley is a nice guy with glasses, from Madera [near Los Angeles]. He's very connected there, meaning that he would meet all the gangstas, but he knew he was from the suburbs. Sometimes, he would go back to his house and a gangsta would follow him, so he would have to use his gift of the gab to get out of the situation--like, "Oh, no, well, my mom wouldn't ..." [laughs] So I used the kind of music that he listens to to cultivate that character. He would listen to some smooth jazz when he's at home, and then maybe he would front a little bit when he was riding past the boys, and pop in the G-Unit. But he really was from that fabric of cool black stuff.

EM: So that was a character that was trying to navigate two worlds at once, which is something that's very difficult to get across. You're either a gangsta or you're not, but there is no way that those worlds can intersect.

JF: The thing is that those worlds really don't intersect, and it's fine for that separation to exist. The only problem is that once somebody treats you differently because of it--once somebody looks at you and goes, "Oh, you speak too good English. What the fuck is your problem? Are you trying to be white?" or "Why don't you pull up your pants, n--? What are they going to say about us?"--then that's wrong. Black people exist in every facet of life, and they're not getting away from their race because they like different types of music. Wynton Marsalis is no less black than 50 Cent. So you have to look at the whole [of black culture], and that doesn't happen in the movies because sometimes we don't allow it to. But I'm sure we're going to start to get a chance to do our own movies and allow that to exist in the movie world, too.

DATE: SEPTEMBER 1, 2004

EM: A lot of these characters you've played recently in movies, from Redemption to Breakin' All the Rules, Collateral, and now Ray, have been very different people. And two of them have been real-life characters. That's a lot of moving back and forth.