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(Credits: Far Out \/ YouTube Still)<\/p>\n
Sun 3 August 2025 0:23, UK <\/p>\n
Long before John Goodman<\/a> became an actor, he had a deep affinity for one of the greatest movie monsters ever created. In fact, he remembers watching the original movie as a wide-eyed ten-year-old, stunned at what he was seeing onscreen.<\/p>\n Decades later, the Missouri native established himself as one of Hollywood\u2019s most in-demand character actors by building a wildly varied filmography of silver screen and television credits. He was a mainstay in Coen brothers movies, a beloved sitcom star, a versatile voice actor, and the kind of actor who worked with the best directors in the business, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Robert Zemeckis, to name a few. <\/p>\n However, it wasn\u2019t until Goodman was well into his 60s that his childhood monster came back into his life in a way that caught him completely off guard. Indeed, when director Jordan Vogt-Roberts approached him about starring in 2017\u2019s Kong: Skull Island, a new version of the giant ape\u2019s story<\/a>, envisioned as part of a \u2018Monsterverse\u2019 of films alongside Godzilla, he didn\u2019t quite know what to say. <\/p>\n \u201cI never thought I\u2019d have a shot of doing anything like this,\u201d Goodman, then 64, told the Daily News. \u201cI don\u2019t fit any of the types that would be in a King Kong movie.\u201d<\/p>\n However, Vogt-Roberts insisted that the actor was the right man to play Bill Randa, a shadowy Monarch agency member researching the possible existence of enormous creatures in remote and subterranean parts of the world. It is Randa who charters an expedition to Skull Island, Kong\u2019s home, which is chock-full of all manner of terrifying primordial beasties just waiting to chow down on unsuspecting humans.<\/p>\n Goodman was excited to star in Kong: Skull Island, and took his character as seriously as any movie he\u2019d made that didn\u2019t involve 100-feet-tall CGI apes and ravenous lizards known as Skullcrawlers. \u201cAll these weird conspiracy theories you\u2019ve ever heard, they\u2019re all true,\u201d Goodman told Den of Geek about Randa\u2019s outlook on the world. <\/p>\n \u201cHe had first-hand knowledge of it from his Navy experience. I think it scarred him for life and sent him on this quest, to the point where he\u2019s become like Captain Ahab. It just doesn\u2019t really matter what else happens as long as he proves that these things exist.\u201d<\/p>\n