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

Interview, Nov, 2004 by Elvis Mitchell

JF: I didn't say that black people can't break through--I'm saying that you need to create your own bubble. See, that's my thing. I never say, "Oh, I want to break through and be just like them." I want to create my own stuff. I say, "Okay, I'll watch Taylor Hackford do his thing with his resources, and I'll watch Spike Lee do his thing with his resources, and I'll learn from that." Once we adopt that way of thinking, we'll make our own thing. The thing with black Hollywood is that we never want to work with black Hollywood. We never want to work with black folks.

EM: Is that really true?

JF: You can't ask that question living this long, in this city, working where you work and being in this environment.

EM: But people who are reading this are going to want to know.

JF: And people who are reading this should know that you asked me that question. Is it really like that? Yeah it's like that. You know it's like that. The thing is, what do you do in that situation? I work every single day to make it to where African Americans, black folks, can feel good about themselves and working with their own people. Sometimes I'll take the risk of not getting a gig, but I said, "Well, you know what? If you don't take those steps to make it work and then be successful with it, you're never going to get it." But you watch these cats like Will Smith move, or R Diddy, or Andre 3000, or Russell Simmons, and they've still got respect. They've still got the ghetto pass.

EM: So, basically, what you're saying is that there's this thing that keeps white Hollywood and black Hollywood separate and not only that, but black Hollywood itself can't find a way to come together.

JF: Black Hollywood hasn't found a way to come together because nobody is really trying yet. I'm one of the tryers. P. Diddy is one of the tryers. They always put hip-hop in a bad category, but look at how those guys work it, how they get their clothes together, how they help each other out. If one rapper gets a hit song, then another rapper gets a hit song because the first guy calls the other guy to rap on it. These young kids are not dummies. They're not afraid to be who they are, and that's when it's great, man. My philosophy has always been that I don't have to work for anybody, but I can work with anybody.

EM: Was that part of the lesson you learned from doing In Living Color?

JF: Oh, yeah. Keenen taught me a very valuable lesson. He said, "Being black in this business, you have to be spectacular. There's no room for you being mediocre." He said, "Just be the best man."

EM: I'm guessing that you would like to think that somehow there would he a black director who could have done Ray.

JF: What you wanted was a great director. There is a difference between what you feel as an activist, and what you feel artistically. Everything comes together in art. With Ray, Taylor Hackford, knowing that he had the reigns of this movie, really listened. He listened to suggestions that I had about things like casting--that if you cast this movie the "wrong" black Hollywood way, the project was not going to be what it could be.