Nolte: Jamie Foxx Admits ‘God Sometimes Slips Away’ in Hollywood

Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx admitted Sunday that “when you’re in Hollywood … God sometimes slips away.”

The 57-year-old, who suffered a stroke and weeks-long coma in 2023 due to a brain bleed, said that the near-death experience has brought him closer to God.

“When it happened, I said, ‘If I am able to get past this — and God spoke to me in a way, you know, when you’re in Hollywood, you know, God sometimes slips away,” he told Extra. “But when I spoke to him, he says, ‘I need you to sit here for a second, but when you get back out there, I ain’t telling you to be an angel, but you have a different thing.’”

He added that there are “no bad days” anymore and he no longer takes life for granted. “You take a picture on your cell phone and you hit that filter, and it brightens up, that’s the way my life looks now.”

“When you dream about what you want to be, you only dream about the good things… the career, the house, you never dream tragedy,” he added. “When tragedy happens in a real way, you need solid family and friends, so the two ladies that are with me tonight, Corinne Marie Foxx, my daughter, and Anelise Estelle Foxx held me down in a way that is hard to interpret in these settings.”

He compared the care his daughters took of him to how Michael Corleone stood up his own father after being shot in the classic film The Godfather. “You have to show up and really take over everything,” he said, “and she did that and that’s why I’m here.”

To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, nothing concentrates the mind like a near-death experience.

Hollywood doesn’t only need God to save their own souls, but one of the primary reasons art is so lacking these days is a refusal to acknowledge God as part of the human condition — the importance of the soul. As the counterculture pushed God away in the late 60s, that hole has been filled with more and more nonsense — cults, self-love, gurus, sex, normalizing narcissism, and above all, politics. Art should enrich the human spirit and bring us closer to God. I look for God in everything I watch.

For example, right now I’m watching The Offer, the 2022 limited series about the making of The Godfather. It’s a good show, addicting and interesting, but it’s not really about anything other than overcoming obstacles to get a movie made. There’s something hollow about it, something missing. It’s all plot-plot-plot, which is fine to a point. It’s no Sopranos, which was all about the soul.

Maybe Foxx can bring some of this to his work. There is certainly an audience for it. 

John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.