Eric Marlon Bishop (December 13, 1967, Terrell, Texas, USA), known professionally as Jamie Foxx, is an American actor, comedian, and singer who is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Grammy Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. In 1991, he joined the cast as a featured player in the sketch comedy show In Living Color until the show's end in 1994. Following this success, Foxx was given his own television sitcom The Jamie Foxx Show, in which he starred, co-created and produced, airing for five highly rated seasons from 1996 to 2001 on The WB Television Network.
He subsequently became widely known for his portrayal of Ray Charles in the 2004 biographical film Ray, for which he won the Academy Award, British Academy Film Award, Screen Actors Guild Award, Critics' Choice Movie Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Actor, becoming the second actor to win all five major lead actor awards for the same performance. That same year, Foxx was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the crime film Collateral. Since spring 2017, Foxx has served as the host and executive producer of the Fox game show Beat Shazam.
Foxx's other acting roles include Staff Sergeant Sykes in Jarhead (2005), record executive Curtis Taylor Jr. in Dreamgirls (2006), Detective Ricardo Tubbs in the 2006 film adaptation of the TV series Miami Vice, Django Freeman in the film Django Unchained (2012), the supervillain Electro in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) and Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), Will Stacks in Annie (2014), gangster Leon "Bats" Jefferson III in Baby Driver (2017) and as Walter McMillian in Just Mercy (2019), receiving a nomination for a Screen Actors Guild Award for the latter.
Foxx is also a Grammy Award-winning musician, releasing four studio albums which have charted in the top ten of the U.S. Billboard 200: Unpredictable (2005), which topped the chart, Intuition (2008), Best Night of My Life (2010), and Hollywood: A Story of a Dozen Roses (2015).
Eric Marlon Bishop was born on December 13, 1967, in Terrell, Texas. He is the son of Darrell Bishop (renamed Shahid Abdula following his conversion to Islam), who sometimes worked as a stockbroker, and Louise Annette Talley Dixon. Shortly after his birth, Foxx was adopted and raised by his mother's adoptive parents, Estelle Marie (Nelson), a domestic worker and nursery operator, and Mark Talley, a yard worker. He has had little contact with his birth parents, who were not part of his upbringing. Foxx was raised in the black quarter of Terrell, which at the time was a racially segregated community. He has often acknowledged his grandmother's influence in his life as one of the greatest reasons for his success.
Foxx began playing the piano when he was five years old. He had a strict Baptist upbringing, and as a teenager he was a part-time pianist and choir leader in Terrell's New Hope Baptist Church. His natural talent for telling jokes was already in evidence as a third grader, when his teacher would use him as a reward: if the class behaved well, Foxx would tell them jokes. Foxx attended Terrell High School, where he received top grades and played basketball and football (as quarterback). His ambition was to play for the Dallas Cowboys, and he was the first player in the school's history to pass for more than 1,000 yards. He also sang in a band called Leather and Lace. After completing high school, Foxx received a scholarship to United States International University, where he studied musical and performing arts composition.
Foxx first told jokes at a comedy club's open mic night in 1989, after accepting a girlfriend's dare. When he found that female comedians were often called first to perform, he chose the stage name of Jamie Foxx, which he felt was ambiguous enough to disallow any biases, with his surname being a tribute to the black comedian Redd Foxx. Foxx joined the cast of In Living Color in 1991, where his recurrent character Wanda also shared a name with Redd's friend and co-worker, LaWanda Page. Following a recurring role in the comedy-drama sitcom Roc, Foxx went on to star in his own sitcom The Jamie Foxx Show, from 1996 to 2001, and he also produced through his company Foxx Hole Productions.
Foxx made his film debut in the 1992 comedy Toys. His first dramatic role came in Oliver Stone's 1999 film Any Given Sunday, where he was cast as a hard-partying quarterback, partly because of his own football background. During filming, Foxx fought with costar LL Cool J.
In 2003, Foxx featured on the rapper Twista's song, "Slow Jamz", together with Kanye West, which reached No. 1 on the US Billboard Hot 100 singles chart and #3 on the UK Singles chart. His second collaboration with Kanye West, "Gold Digger," in which Foxx sang the Ray Charles-influenced "I Got a Woman" hook, then went straight to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, remaining there for 10 weeks. In 2005, Foxx featured on the single "Georgia" by Atlanta rappers Ludacris and Field Mob, which sampled Ray Charles' hit "Georgia on My Mind".
Foxx would also portray Ray Charles in the biographical film Ray (2004), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor and the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. Foxx is the third male in history (after Barry Fitzgerald and Al Pacino) to receive two acting Oscar nominations in the same year for two different movies, Collateral and Ray. In 2005, Foxx was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
In 2013, Foxx was cast as President James Sawyer in White House Down alongside Channing Tatum. The following year, Foxx appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 as the villain Electro, and co-starred with Quvenzhané Wallis in Annie, Sony's Will Smith and Jay-Z produced update of the comic strip-turned-musical. In 2017, Foxx starred as Bats, a trigger-happy gang member, in Edgar Wright's action film Baby Driver.
Foxx starred in Project Power, directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, opposite Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Dominique Fishback, which was released on August 14, 2020, by Netflix. That September, Foxx signed an overall deal with Sony Pictures Entertainment. Foxx then voiced the main character, jazz pianist and music teacher Joe Gardner, in the Pixar animated film Soul (2020). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Soul was released direct-to-streaming on Disney+ in most countries, including the United States, though it did get a theatrical release in some countries. USA Today's Brian Truitt commended Foxx's performance, saying he brought "warmth, humor and an occasional touch of exasperation" to the role.
| Year | Image | Character | Title |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 
|
Nico | Rio |