John Goodman brought his long weight loss journey into full view Monday night at the Los Angeles premiere of “Digger,” appearing in a black suit, striped shirt and gray tie alongside his wife, Anna Beth, who wore a long maroon dress and matching heels.
The 74-year-old actor posed solo and with his wife on the red carpet before the screening of the Tom Cruise-led satirical film, in which Goodman plays the President of the United States. “Digger” opens in theaters Friday.
Also at the premiere were Cruise, 64, and co-stars Riz Ahmed, Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Emma D’Arcy and Robert John Burke, along with director Alejandro González Iñárritu.
The red carpet appearance came a couple of months after Goodman revealed he fractured his hip during production of the film, after slipping in his stockinged feet on set. He told the Hollywood Reporter in July that a doctor on set got him into the Cleveland Clinic in London, where he was operated on the next morning. “So far, so good,” he said.
A years-long journey
Goodman’s slimmed-down appearance is the result of a transformation he began in 2007, after weighing around 400 pounds at his heaviest. He has credited quitting drinking, hiring a personal trainer, cutting out sugar and switching to a Mediterranean-style diet for helping him shed the weight.
“It takes a lot of creative energy to sit on your ass and figure out what you’re going to eat next,” he told People in 2010.
In a 2016 interview with ABC News, Goodman recalled earlier attempts at weight loss that didn’t stick. “In the old days,” he said, he would “take three months out, lose 60 or 70 pounds, and then reward myself with a 6-pack of bud or whatever and just go back to my old habits.”
“This time I wanted to do it slowly, move, exercise. I’m getting to the age where I can’t afford to sit still anymore.”
He added that staying fit “gives me the energy to work, ’cause work is very draining.”
In a 2023 interview with Rolling Stone, Goodman said he had lost 200 pounds in part by taking up boxing, describing sessions of “an hour, hour and a half of hitting the mitts, hitting the bags, learning footwork.” “It’s great,” he said.
