“About six months before we started filming, I got drunk and called and said, ‘I don’t think I can do this’ … And I wound up doing it.

Goodman, however, didn’t feel as though he had a choice in the matter. I was not something that I wanted to do,” he also told GQ. I knew I was going to hear Yabba Dabba Doo for the rest of my life, and I … hadn’t like The Flintstones since I was in the fifth grade.” “And I’m just thinking,” Goodman says, “Oh god. “I was doing my first table read for Always and he comes in and sits down and says, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I have an announcement to make. “I got roped into it,” Goodman told Marc Maron on this week’s WTF podcast. He was “ sandbagged” by Steven Spielberg into the role. And yet, that’s exactly where he found himself, starring in a film that would eventually make nearly $350 million worldwide on a $46 million budget, spawning a sequel that Goodman (and the entire rest of the original cast) declined to participate in ( Viva Rock Vegas was a box office disaster).īut Goodman didn’t actually want the role. The last thing that John Goodman needed at the time was a role as Fred in The Flintstones directed by the guy behind Beethoven and Problem Child 2. He was a star on one of the biggest sitcoms on television, Roseanne, and he was making films with Steven Spielberg ( Always), Frank Marshall ( Arachnophobia), the Coen Brothers ( Barton Fink) and working with the likes of Peter O’Toole ( King Ralph). Elizabeth Perkins captures Wilma’s velvet-voiced maternal soothingness, her gentle way of calling her husband ”Frad.” And if Rosie O’Donnell is hardly a double for the svelte Betty, that’s forgotten the moment she duplicates Betty’s delighted rapid-fire giggle.Things were going well for John Goodman back in the early 1990s. Moranis is a perfect Barney, so dumb he’s all trust. The plot actually functions like an old Flintstones episode-it’s diverting and weightless at the same time. The catch? He has to fire Barney Rubble (Rick Moranis). As part of an embezzlement scheme orchestrated by Cliff Vandercave (Kyle MacLachlan, whose thrusting chin makes him look more like a living cartoon than any of the other actors), Fred wins a promotion to senior executive at Slate & Co. Goodman doesn’t particularly sound like Fred Flintstone-he slips in and out of Fred’s bellicose New York accent-but he gets the blend of surliness and gullibility that made this Ralph Kramden Lite such a winning character.

Growly and genial, with a big wide head that thickens into his chest, John Goodman centers the movie with his majestic good nature.

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