The Oscar winner opened up about playing the famous heavyweight boxer in a long-awaited biopic.
Jamie Foxx's long-gestating Mike Tyson biopic is finally coming to fruition. The Oscar winner recently revealed that the project, which he's been working on for years, will soon become a reality, and he's gearing up to get into fighting shape.
Foxx recently joined Mark Birnbaum on Birnbaum's Instagram Live series Catching Up, and he dished on the long-awaited project, as well as his own workout regimen.
"What I'm doing right now is changing the body. So now what I do, every other day, I do 60 pull-ups, we do 60 dips, we do 100 push-ups," Foxx said, adding that he's mostly just focusing on "the top half" and not worrying about his legs.
"I ain’t got no calf muscles, so we’re gonna have to get some prosthetics for that," Foxx joked.
The actor also said that his final appearance is going to be incredibly convincing once they finalize "the technology of how I’m gonna look." However, he didn't explain if that meant employing CGI or traditional makeup and facial prosthetics.
"I guarantee you people will run up on me in the street, and ask for autographs, and think that I’m Mike," Foxx predicted, before showing a snapshot on his phone of the progress he's made toward getting into Tyson shape.
As for the film itself, the actor -- who previously portrayed music icon Ray Charles in the acclaimed 2004 biopic Ray -- explained that doing a movie about a real person "is a tough thing."
"Sometimes it takes 20 years to get them done," Foxx said, "But we officially got the ball rolling."
As for the content itself, Foxx said he wanted to play Tyson in a way that examined the nuances of Tyson's inner life and not just the controversies and tabloid rumors that surrounded him during his time in the ring.
"We want to show, everybody evolves," Foxx shared. "I think when we lay the layers on Mike Tyson in this story, I think everybody from young and old will be able to understand this man’s journey."
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