Frank is a loan shark in the Los Angeles underworld. Sweating with his shirt off in a sauna, as bloated and wobbly as Jabba the Hutt, he's a menacing character who dispenses profane philosophy to a gambler who should have known when to quit.
"You get up 2½ million dollars, any asshole in the world knows what to do," Frank barks. "You get a house with a 25-year-roof, an indestructible Jap-economy shitbox, you put the rest into the system at three to five per cent to pay your taxes and that's your base, get me? That's your fortress of f----ing solitude."
While John Goodman has a supporting role in the Hollywood crime thriller The Gambler, he almost steals the movie as a threatening, bald philosopher with a conscience about lending money to the desperate and doughless.
"They asked me if I'd shave my head and I said, `Yeah, I've never done that before'," he says in that familiar gravelly southern rumble of a voice. "I've done it on stage, but it didn't work, because I looked like I had a five o'clock shadow. But they managed to spraypaint my head so I actually looked bald. I thought it looked great."
It's another memorable character role for Goodman, who, at 62, sounds as if he has been reflecting on life lately. "I look back a little bit more than I should", he says. "I'm supposed to pay attention to here and now and let the past go."
Is Goodman the United States' best character actor? Since making his name in the television series Roseanne in the late 1980s, he has put a good case by playing authority figures who are not to be messed with, but often have heart.
In The Gambler, a remake of a James Caan film from 1974, Mark Wahlberg plays a literature professor with a compulsive gambling habit, so compulsive, in fact, that he keeps upping the stakes when he wins at blackjack until he inevitably loses a sizeable fortune, which is why he needs cash from a fast-talking loan shark who conducts business in a sauna.
"He definitely has his own views on life and he's not shy of sharing them," Goodman says of Frank, "but I guess if you're sitting around in a spa, you have nothing to do but talk." He wonders for a moment whether that's right, then adds: "I hope."
Without much in the way of awards recognition – no Oscar nominations and just one win from 10 Emmy and another one win from five Golden Globe nods – Goodman has built a substantial career in US cinema. He was in consecutive winners of the best picture Oscar – The Artist in 2012 and Argo in 2013 – and he has featured in six Coen brothers movies, including The Big Lebowski, Raising Arizona and Barton Fink.
His comic and dramatic range extends from The West Wing, Sesame Street and Treme on television to The Hangover Part III, Flight and The Monuments Men in the movies. He has also voiced characters in the Hollywood hits Transformers: Age Of Extinction, Cars, Bee Movie, Monsters Inc and Monsters University.
Always a big guy – 188 centimetres tall and once reputedly weighing more than 170 kilograms – Goodman has played three classic well-rounded physiques on screen: Babe Ruth (The Babe), Fred Flintstone (The Flintstones) and Santa Claus (numerous times). Well, four if you include Anna Nicole Smith on the TV comedy Saturday Night Live.
As he heads to the London stage for the first time, fulfilling a long-held ambition by performing in David Mamet's American Buffalo, Goodman has a matter-of-fact assessment of his career.
"All I wanted to do was to be able to make a living as an actor and pay my bills," he says. "I kind of wish I'd set my ambitions a little higher than that, but it worked out. It didn't seem like it would for a while."
Goodman was born in St Louis and was just two when his postal worker father died of a heart attack. He played American football at school, while his mother worked in a restaurant and washed laundry to support her three children.
"We were just busy being kids," he says. "I had a pretty good time. I felt bad for my mum, 'cause she had to work so hard."
It was at university that he fell in love with acting. "It was kind of a detective thing and I finally started putting clues together," he says. "You've got to know this, you've got to know that.
"You start maybe reading history a little more seriously, paying attention to art a little more. Music comes into it. All the things that play into telling a good story are all of a sudden fascinating.
"For most of my life, I was a terrible student. I was more interested in having kicks than learning anything until there was a purpose for it. It was a calling. I was very lucky."
A visit to the theatre in New York gave Goodman a belief that he could act professionally. "I went to a Broadway show," he says. "My cousin got me some free tickets. Otherwise, I couldn't have afforded it.
"I saw this guy in there floundering around on stage. I thought, `Shit, I could do this better than that guy'. That bolstered my confidence. I was already in New York feeling bad and scared and everything, so that was a big deal for me: knowing that I could actually do it."
His most memorable movies include "anything with Joel and Ethan Coen's name on it" and The Monuments Men, which George Clooney directed and co-starred in with Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Jean Dujardin and Cate Blanchett.
"It didn't do too well, but I just had the best goddamn time making it and hanging with the company," he says.
The movie made Goodman an unabashed fan of Clooney. "I noticed at the Golden Globes he was taking a little bit of ribbing for it, but he's one of the best people I've ever met in my life, just down to earth, and he's got a heart the size of all outdoors."
While he admits to rarely working in Hollywood any more, Goodman has noticed big changes in the movies. "A lot of the good writers are going to television. I'm getting a little too old for some of the cartoon movies now. I appreciate 'em, but they're not quite as fulfilling as maybe they would have been 30 years ago. But I like the spectacle you can get in film, and I love to watch the Brits act and our Aussie friends. Cate Blanchett, goddamn she's wonderful."
The Gambler is set in a shady Los Angeles underworld that Goodman half recognises from a life with its own colourful times. "I used to go to underground gambling clubs in New York with a tiny amount of money," he says. "I didn't have any business being there.
"It's fun in the film that such places exist in LA. I like the dirty LA – the freeway, ugly underpass kind of look. There's a movie called To Live and Die in L.A. that has that look about it that I really dig. It's the kind of shit I used to see driving home from wherever at 4.30 in the morning with my eyes barely functioning."
So what was he doing up until 4.30 in the morning?
"Looking for something to keep me up till 5.30."
While Wahlberg inevitably gets a scene with his shirt off, it's rarer to see Goodman stripped down to just a towel in The Gambler. "Nobody needs to see that shit," he says, "but there's nothing I can do about it, so I just had to not pay any attention."
That raises the question of whether vanity – the curse of so many Hollywood actors and actresses – ever affects Goodman's performances.
"Not for me," he says. "I'm so far removed from having to worry about it. I mean, I'm in the minor leagues as far as looks go, so it's no big deal."
On set, Wahlberg did a lot of exercise with a skipping rope to keep his weight down after reputedly losing 30 kilograms to play a muscleman in Pain and Gain. Goodman was not tempted to join in. "Hell no," he says. "I ate whatever he gave up."
Nevertheless, Goodman says his own weight is falling too. "It's not convenient to be this heavy, so I'm trying to do something about it and stay reasonably fit," he says. "No drinking. While I was in Australia, I got to have Victoria Bitter, so that was good. Somebody sent me a slab when I got back over here."
He came to Australia to play a Chicago mobster muscling in on the Sydney crime scene in David Caesar's 2002 film, Dirty Deeds, opposite Bryan Brown, Sam Neill and Toni Collette.
"I had the very, very best time," Goodman says. "It was a small film, so everybody was there to pitch in, which is something I like. We all did our bit and everybody got along great."
He jokes that he might give up acting after the London play. "I'll live off my theatre money," he says, "and start a rugby club. Does Russell still have his club?"
While he missed Russell Crowe's South Sydney Rabbitohs winning the NRL premiership last year, Goodman can be forgiven. For someone who once described himself as lazy – "Nobody likes to loaf more than me" – he's been busy.
As he talks about his life, it emerges that he has given up drinking for more than just weight loss. He admitted in an interview last year that he was an alcoholic for 30 years.
"The first five years I drank were great," he says, when asked about his struggles with drink. "Then the next five to 10 I spent trying to keep up with the first five and get that good feeling again, and it just never worked. It took over my life. I've got 7½ years without it and I don't miss it at all.
"In the beginning, it was great sport, but there's just something in me that's allergic to it. If I have one, that's never good enough. I've got to have more, so I'm better off without it."
The Gambler is out on Thursday.
