John Goodman became a household name in the 1990s after playing the portly, warm-hearted husband Dan Conner in the hit sitcom Roseanne.
However, the 74-year-old actor looked almost unrecognisable as he joined his real-life wife on the red carpet for the Los Angeles premiere of his latest film, Digger.
Goodman has lost more than 14st since giving up alcohol after a three-decade struggle with drinking.
He cut a sharp figure in a navy suit, striped shirt and tie, posing beside his wife Anna Beth, 57, who wore a flowing maroon dress with matching slingback heels.
Digger is a dark satirical comedy-drama directed by Oscar winner Alejandro González Iñárritu, whose previous films include Birdman, The Revenant and Babel.
Tom Cruise stars as Digger Rockwell, an obscenely wealthy and eccentric oil magnate whose actions help set off a devastating environmental catastrophe.
Rockwell then attempts to persuade the world that he is the one person capable of saving humanity.
John Goodman, 74, attended the Los Angeles premiere of his new film, Digger, with his wife Anna Beth, 57
The couple, who have been married for 36 years, smiled warmly and showed their affection on the red carpet
Goodman plays President Compson, the President of the United States and a political counterweight to Cruise’s Rockwell.
He rose to international fame through his nuanced and endearing performance as Dan Conner, the family patriarch and husband of the sitcom’s title character, played by Roseanne Barr.
Goodman’s larger frame was often used for jokes and occasional storylines, and he later revealed that he had weighed as much as 28.5st at his heaviest.
After giving up alcohol and entering rehab in 2007, Goodman began a major weight-loss journey and had shed more than 14st by 2023.
The achievement followed decades of alcoholism, during which he admitted that he would sometimes drink while working on set.
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“It was 30 years of a disease that was taking its toll on everyone around me and it had got to the point where, every time I did it, it was becoming more and more debilitating. It was life or death,” Goodman said five years later. “It was time to stop.”
By 2010, he had lost 100lb after removing sugar from his diet. According to People magazine, he also began exercising six days a week with Mackie Shilstone, the trainer who has worked with Serena Williams.
Goodman described his former heavier lifestyle as “a waste”, adding jokingly: “It takes a lot of creative energy to sit on your a** and figure out what you’re going to eat next.”
His trainer Mackie said the actor “remembers what it feels like to be extremely heavy and it’s something he doesn’t want again”.
Goodman looks dramatically different from the height of his fame, when he played portly family patriarch Dan Conner in the US sitcom Roseanne, often the target of jokes about his weight
The Roseanne star, who has lost 14st after battling long-term alcohol addiction, looked stylish in a navy suit and tie
He placed Goodman on a ‘Mediterranean-style eating plan’ and, where exercise was concerned, had him take a daily 10,000 to 12,000 steps with the assistance of a treadmill and an elliptical trainer.
Goodman attributed his trimmer frame to ‘portion control’, a radical departure from his past habit of ‘just shoving everything into my mouth’, he told AARP magazine.
‘But I don’t want to be an example to anybody when the weight comes thundering back on – when I start eating Crisco out of the can with a spoon and a side of confectioner’s sugar,’ he added.
He was, however, able to avoid that eventuality so successfully that by 2023, Goodman announced he had rid himself of a staggering 14st.
At that stage, his workouts consisted largely of low-intensity activities such as walking his dogs, since the Covid-19 pandemic had caused his previous boxing regimen to lapse ‘because I’m lazy,’ he quipped to Rolling Stone.
‘I haven’t been exercising, but I’m going to start a routine again this summer where I can get some stuff done. I’ve just let everything go just because I haven’t had the energy because of the jobs,’ he explained.
Goodman now has a string of projects in various states of completion, including episodes of the podcast drama Hindsight: The Day Before, on which he plays Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court Justice behind the famous line that ‘free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic’.
His upcoming projects include the film The Hollywood Hitman, in which he plays himself, and the horror movie Skeletons, starring Brie Larson and Willa Fitzgerald.
