It has been six years since it was announced that Jamie Foxx will play the former heavyweight champion boxer, so understandably, fans were beginning to wonder if the movie was going to happen at all. But Foxx says he is moving ahead with the biopic on the life of Boxer Mike Tyson and shared some selfies of himself bulking up in preparation for the role.
What We Know:
- The actor, 52, confirmed the movie was in the works while on Mike Birnbaum’s Instagram Live series Catching Up on Wednesday in which he said, “It’s a definitive yes”. “Doing biographies is a tough thing. Sometimes it takes 20 years to get it done but we officially got the real ball rolling,” Foxx said. “I can’t wait to show people what it is.”
- The idea dates back to at least 2014, when Tyson said in an interview that Foxx was hoping to portray him in a biopic. Foxx reiterated Friday that it is “no secret” that he has been pursuing the project for a while.
- Foxx is no stranger to playing real-life figures, having won the best actor Academy Award for playing singer Ray Charles in the acclaimed biopic Ray.
- “We want to show everybody evolves,” Foxx said. “I think when we lay the layer of Mike Tyson in this story, I think everybody from young and old will be able to understand this man’s journey.”
- Foxx also touched on how he’d approach playing Tyson saying, “And then just the technology of how I’m gonna look, I guarantee you people will run up on me in the street, and ask for autographs, and think I’m Mike.”
- Foxx posted hazy photos in front of his mirror showing him shirtless and flaunting his arms, and says he began a regimen of pull-ups and push-ups a few months back in preparation for the Tyson body transformation.
- Foxx recently shared a convincing clip of him doing impressions, including one of Tyson, as well as people like a young and old Dave Chappelle, Jay-Z, Sammy Davis Jr., and Kermit the Frog, in which he further teased that he’d be working on the biopic.
Of course, in Hollywood, any apparently definitive yes can turn out to be false hope, but one would certainly hope all that training will not go to waste. Perhaps Foxx embark on an amateur boxing career if the film does not end up happening.
