To portray Ray Charles, Foxx lost 30 pounds, played all of the piano music—96 music cues—for verisimilitude (the music heard in the movie, however, is Charles himself), and wore special prostheses that rendered him blind on the set for the majority of the 61-day shoot.

“At first we tried gluing my eyes shut,” he says. “Very bad idea.”

Hackford claims that Foxx became so attuned to being blind that he could hear a woman tapping her pencil in a noisy room 25 feet away. But blinding himself was less of a Method technique than a way to give Foxx a better understanding of Charles. From the old interviews, just by listening to Charles’s voice, Foxx says he learned that “when confronted by anything that mattered, he little-boy’d it. He stuttered a lot. Ran around it. Didn’t want to show the real, true feelings. So when his wife pushes him, he says, ‘I gotta get out of here. I need this girl.’ Girl pushes him, ‘I need this song. I gotta get this heroin.’ Never wanted to confront what was actually challenging him.”

“Ray Charles was alone in the dark. That’s what it is, when you really come back to it,” Hackford says. “Invariably he’d sit alone playing chess. He was perfectly able to do that.”

Regina King (center) plays Charles's backup singer and misters, Margie Hendricks.

Among the supporting cast are Kerry Washington (She Hate Me) as Charles’s long-suffering wife, Della; Regina King (Jerry Maguire) as girlfriend and backup singer Margie Hendricks; and Larenz Tate (Why Do Fools Fall in Love) as Quincy Jones. “Everyone who was there was not in it for the money,” says Washington. “They were passionate about the project. It was spiritual because [Foxx] was channeling.”

“It was pretty phenomenal to watch him work,” agrees King, who came in to read for Della but wanted the role of Margie because “you know it’s going to take a lot out of you, but that’s part of the reason you do it.” Filming took place from March to July of 2003, in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and a few small Louisiana towns that double for the small Georgia town that Charles grew up in, as well as in Los Angeles, at the actual house where Charles resided in the ’60s and at RPM Studios. “There were times when we had a lot of extras and there were really rough days or nights, and Jamie, in addition to lip-synching and being right on, was entertaining a restless audience in between takes,” says King. Adds Hackford, “Jamie would do routines, then he’d turn around and be Ray Charles and they would love him all the more.”

The movie wrapped; Hackford assembled an edit and showed it to the studio heads who had turned him down the first time. “Universal was the only studio that stepped up,” Hackford says. “[Universal’s president-COO] Ron Meyer just went with his gut, which is terrific. I had seen the film with an audience, and it’s a whole other experience [than in a screening room]. They are vocal. And I’m not even talking about a black audience. All of a sudden it’s a communal experience—like a Ray Charles concert.”

He’s happy that Charles, who died in June, liked the movie. Shortly before his death, Hackford played it for him—not the final mixed-down version he would have preferred, but off tape in Charles’s office. Still, it had the desired effect.

“He got up at the end and said, ‘Taylor, I’m very pleased, I’m very happy,’ ” Hackford says. “And man, that was everything.”

Cheo Hodari Coker wrote about X2 in the June 2003 issue of PREMIERE. This article originally appeared in the November 2004 issue of PREMIERE magazine.