Comic timing; He acts, he sings, he's really funny.(Jamie Foxx)(Interview)

Byline: Jonathan Van Meter

His new film, Jarhead, has just opened in theaters, and the first single from his new album, Unpredictable, will be released to radio stations all over the country in a couple of days, and Jamie Foxx is running late. Very late. Wearing jeans, fresh white sneakers, a green V-neck sweater, and a plaid baseball cap sitting jaunty and high on the top of his head, Foxx struts into a photography studio in downtown Manhattan and heads straight for the photographer, the legendary English eccentric and ladies' man David Bailey. For a second, it is unclear whether these two wildly different yet strangely similar men are going to get along. But, as they say in the 'hood, game recognizes game. Foxx plants a big kiss on Bailey and tells him he "needs a hug," and so they stand there, in full embrace, for several seconds, and all the tension drains out of the room in an instant.

The shoot goes so smoothly that not three hours later, Foxx is back in his suite at the Mandarin Hotel, kicking off his shoes, unbuckling his belt, and ordering up a lobster sandwich. "You'll get a huge tip if I can get that in 20 minutes," he says into the phone. "And I mean a huge tip." I ask him what he thought of Bailey. "Crazy," he says. "You can tell that it's not just a photograph for him. It's his living. It's his poetry. It's his music. He's the Michael Jordan of his thing. He reminded me of Oliver Stone."

It was Stone who first recognized that Foxx was more than just a stand-up comic and cast him in Any Given Sunday, a football movie in which Foxx played a troubled, larger-than-life NFL quarterback who's given a second chance. The performance heralded the arrival of a serious actor and bona fide star--and delivered Foxx right into the hands of Michael Mann and Taylor Hackford, two of the best directors working in Hollywood today. They cast him in Collateral and Ray, respectively, making 2004 Jamie Foxx's year, as only the third male actor in history to be nominated for both Best and Supporting Actor awards at the same time. And though the roles couldn't have been more different-a nerdy cabdriver who upstages Tom Cruise's chilly assassin and a spooky-perfect reincarnation of Ray Charles-they both allowed him to draw on his gift for portraying hobbled but proud men.

Foxx's exuberant and emotional acceptance speech after winning Best Actor for Ray was one of the most thrilling Oscar moments ever, and he has decided to take all his newfound clout and goodwill (was there anyone who wasn't rooting for him?) and do what he originally planned to when he first moved to L.A. more than fifteen years ago: make music.

Unpredictable, which comes out this month, is populated by a galaxy of hip-hop and R&B stars, from Kanye West (with whom Foxx has already had a number-one single, "Gold Digger"), Mary J. Blige, Ludacris, and Twista to hitmaking producers Timbaland and Babyface. The result of employing so much top-shelf talent is a canny mix of R&B and hip-hop, with several songs evincing an utterly-of-the-moment minimalist vibe: lots of whistling and whispering over human beat-box rhythms. It is a new trend in hip-hop/R&B fusion that was recently described in the Los Angeles Times as "intimate club music"-dance music sung like a Marvin Gaye ballad. Foxx says that he could perform the whole album sitting at the piano with just a deejay for backup.

"The record definitely has a sense of me singing to someone," says Foxx. "All the songs are geared toward a woman listening." Suddenly, he begins to quietly croon one of the tracks: "Got nothing but my T-shirt and boxers on/Waiting for you to get home/It's been sunny outside all day, babe/I can't wait for it to storm/Let me feel your raindrops falling ...