When you're casting for the role of Ray Charles, a few things have to be right. The actor has to play piano, effect the body language of a blind man, and have mucho, mucho soul. Comedian-actor Jamie Foxx, who first came onto our radar on In Living

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Color and recently shared the screen with Tom Cruise in Collateral has it all. He talks about being schooled by the sightless R&B singer for the new biopic Ray, and learning to find the music under his fingers.

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You worked with Ray Charles to master his signature moves. Was it difficult to walk the line between acting and mimicry?

Jamie Foxx: It's called nuance. The first thing we did is we lost 30 pounds. I walk around at 190. So I was 157 pounds with the help of my trainer; he actually changed my metabolism. Eddie Murphy said, "You're going to do good, because you got that jaw like Ray Charles." So that's one of the things that worked in our favor. And then when I put the shades on, it all kind of came together. Then it was just a matter of finding the nuance. I mean, most of the time the impersonation of Ray is [puts on old man voice] "Oh, Georgia ..." But when we met each other, there were things that I took from him as I was sitting there with him. I was looking for the realness of it: how he orders his food, how he talks to his kids, how he gets angry. The best Ray Charles thing in the movie happens when he answers the phone when they call to tell him the charges are dropped. He opens his legs, and he sits in what I'd call a "down home" way of answering the phone. It's the nuance, and once you get that, you're not watching Ray Charles anymore. You're watching a blind man going through some things - a blind man that is blessed with talent, a blind man that is on a journey.

See Photos From The Movie

Was it hard to convince Hollywood that you had the dramatic chops for this role?

JF: I never really factor Hollywood into anything. I'm a black actor - I can't really worry about what Hollywood figures. I gotta do my thing; my jokes have gotta be funny, whatever I do has gotta to be great. When I first got on In Living Color I found out that it wasn't like what I thought it would be: if you weren't on time, if you got there at 10:01, you had to explain that one minute. And it was a serious situation. I learned something from Keenan Ivory Wayans. He said, "The reason I'm on you so tough, Jamie, because if you're mediocre, you're not gonna make it as an African-American actor or actress or comedian or singer." He said, "You gotta be top of the line, all the time." I ran into Keenan at the Comedy Awards, and he's still echoing the same things. You gotta blaze your own trail and then pull it your way. It's like hip-hop. It's like how hip-hop pulled like everything. Fortune 500 companies are calling Puff, asking "what do we do? How do we sell this product?" So it's basically that mentality we all have as young cats out there in Hollywood. You're never going to convince anybody. The only thing you can do is stay true to the art. I'll drop another name - a white man's name - Lorne Michaels, from Saturday Night Live. I was asking him, "How come people fall off?" He says, "Jamie, they don't fall off, it's just the projects they choose. As long as you choose the right projects, you never have to worry about anything."

What made you think you could handle this role?

JF: I had done Ray Charles impersonations before that never made it on TV, so I knew that I could kind of get into that head space. But it's still the challenge of "Can you really make people believe it? Can you really look at a biopic - which, you know, is very tough to do, because when you look at other biopics, it's like, "Wow, that person looks kind of like him, but I can still see ..." So I needed to go beyond that, [get to] a place where, when people see it, they go, "Wow, I'm not seeing Jamie Foxx!"

[Jamie On Going Blind]

Did the real Ray Charles put you through your paces?

JF: When I first met Ray he was like, "Let me check out these fingers - aw, yeah, you got strong fingers." So we sat down at dual pianos. He's playing one piano and I'm playing the other. We're singing the blues, and he says, "If you can sing the blues, Jamie, you can sing anything." We're singing the blues back and forth. And then he says, "Well, how about this?" And he goes into Thelonious Monk. It's like the equivalent to riding the mechanical bull when you've had too many drinks and you just fly all the way out into the bar. I hit a wrong note and he said, "Well, why in the hell would you do that?" and he was very serious about it. He wasn't laughing. I was like, "Well, I didn't know?" And he said, "The notes are right underneath your fingers." I started listening to him as he was speaking. His music is his harmony. If it's off, his whole life is off. He said, "The notes are right underneath your fingers, Jamie. You just got to take the time to find them, young man." So I used that as a metaphor through the whole movie, that our life is notes underneath our fingers, and we just gotta figure out which notes we want to play. So that's what we started doing right there. I said, "OK, I'm going to play the right Ray Charles notes and I'm going to play this Ray Charles story." Afterwards, I when I finally got the Thelonious Monk riff, he said, "There it is. That's what I'm talking about. Now come on!" He jumped up, he slapped his thighs and he said, "The kid's got it."

[Jamie On Ray Charles' Story]

You were raised by your grandparents. Did you draw on your experiences with your grandmother when playing against Ray's mother?

JF: Of course. When I come to New York I'm like, "I can't believe how many buildings there are, how much concrete, how much steel, how many people." And when I'm in L.A. it's too nice; it's the sun shining, it's palm trees, everybody's smiling. But in the South, there's a real dose of how people really feel. And it's been in Southern people for so long that's just how it is.

Ray Charles was the first person to stick his hand out and try to stop that domino effect, that racial domino, that ignorant domino, that "I'm better than you" domino. Ray put things in perspective. He said, "Oh, whites-only bathroom, colored-only bathroom - I can't see that, I just need to use the bathroom." Bill Cosby told a story the other night, where Ray Charles is playing the Playboy Jazz Fest and how the whole orchestra was white. Cosby walked up and said "Did you know that the whole orchestra is white?" And Ray says "Funny, they don't sound white."

When I was growing up, the railroad tracks separated the black side from the white side of my town. The only time I saw white people was when somebody was going to jail, and when the insurance man came to our door. That was my acting class. When that insurance man came my mother said, "Tell ‘em I ain't here!" And I said, "Well, I told them that last month." "Well, you better make something up!" So that was my first acting job! "Granny says she ain't here." [Ray and I have] similarities in that Southern upbringing, that Southern way of talking to women. When I'm in L.A., I'm Mr. West Coast and I say, "Man, I love it." But I know on the inside, I've got something else working too. There are a lot of different similarities with Ray and myself.

[Jamie On Ray Charles' Return To Georgia]

People are calling this an Oscar caliber performance. Are you nervous that your subsequent work will be judged against it?

JF: This is the Cinderella time right now. This is when everybody says, "Oh, we love you!" It's like flying out of Los Angeles. When you fly out of L.A., it's pretty and everything is nice. And then the pilot comes on, "Uh, we're gonna have a little weather over Detroit..." So we're gonna hit some weather, I'm sure, with the different projects that we choose. But to be honest with you, I've got a couple of decent projects that - for now, I can kind of sit back and say, "Yeah, these are gonna be some great things."