John Goodman has said he is “still getting used to” his face and body after losing 14 stone.
The actor, best known for films including The Big Lebowski (1998) and The Flintstones (1994), lost almost half his body weight over the past decade.
He did so through a change in diet, an increase in exercise and stomach surgery. Goodman did not take any GLP-1s such as Ozempic of Wegovy.
During a recent appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the actor opened up about his dramatic weight loss, saying that he “ignores” the public commentary surrounding his body.
“Since I’m in this business, it is fair game, up to a point,” he added. “But yeah, I’m still trying to get used to my face. It’s weird. I think of myself as one way, and then I look at myself, ‘Oh, wow.’”
Asked whether he felt that his previous weight – of approximately 28 stone – ever held him back in terms of his career, Goodman told host Josh Horowitz that it did, but that there was a degree of “self-sabotage” involved. “I was working enough as I was,” he said. “I wasn’t crazy about it, but I wonder if I sabotaged myself.”
Goodman also spoke about his weight loss journey in an interview with The Times over the weekend.
The Roseanne star said that one of the positives of his weight loss is the fact that he is largely unrecognisable to fans and so there is a degree of anonymity now afforded to him when he goes out in public.
On the subject of dressing for his changed body, he added: “I still feel like a fat guy, but it’s nice to be able to go into regular clothing stores and buy things.”
Goodman said he began his weight loss journey in 2016 the old-fashioned way: by cutting back on sugar, snacks, and working with a personal trainer.
“I was eating alcoholically. It was just something to up the ante,” he told The Times. “It was dangerous. My joints were shot from the weight I was carrying.”
Goodman has had both knees replaced, and works out a lot in the gym. Although he said that he would have used weight-loss jabs had they been available to him back then, Goodman said he does not use them even now because “it’s got to be co-ordinated with other things”.
Elsewhere in the interview, Goodman recalled his childhood as a “latchkey kid” – whose parents were not home much – explaining that he used food as a comfort.
“I’d just get home and start eating. I’ve had troubles with my weight since I was little and the shame is just unbearable – so you eat more,” he said. “It was always a source of my own weakness that I could flog myself with.”
Overeating, he added, saved him from the US draft for the Vietnam war. “I had to hitchhike to get my physical for the army and either they took pity or they misread my height,” he said.
“They measured me two inches shorter, so I was overweight for immediate draft. ‘Go home and work on it.’ But it never came to it.”
Goodman gained widespread fame as Dan Conner in the hit sitcom Roseanne, which ran from 1988 to 1997. He has gone on to star in several iconic films, including six collaborations with the Coen brothers, Argo, and voicing Sully in Monster’s Inc.
Most recently, he starred in Tom Cruise’s critical flop Digger. He will be joining the cast of Netflix’s The Beast in Me, and HBO’s The Last of Us.
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