DREAMGIRLS: An Interview with Jamie Foxx
By Wilson Morales

December 11, 2006

Not since Will Smith came from the TV world, has an actor captured and taken the film industry by storm other than Jamie Foxx. When you look back, he was the last added member to “In Living Color”, which had Jim Carrey as well and the infamous Wayans family. From there, Foxx went on do small bits and comedic performances such as “Booty Call” and “The Players Club”, but it wasn’t until he co-starred in “Any Given Sunday” that folks started to take notice. While he kept his day job as the star of his sitcom show, “The Jamie Foxx show”, Foxx continued to make some noise in the film industry, especially when his next dramatic performance was as Drem ‘Bundini” Brown, opposite Will Smith in “Ali”. In 2004, Foxx would break records as he would be the first Black to be nominated twice in the lead category for film and television for his work in “Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story” and “Ray”, the Ray Charles. Foxx would eventually win the Best Actor Oscar and join Denzel Washington and Sidney Poitier as the only Black men to hold that honor. This past summer, we saw Foxx play Rico Tubbs in the film version of “Miami Vice” and now Foxx is playing the role of Curtis Taylor Jr., in the most anticipated film of the year, “Dreamgirls”. Not to mention that Foxx released a CD last year that was critically acclaimed. In the film, Curtis is compared to Motown Records founder Berry Gordy, where his character finds a trio of women and makes them into an overnight sensation, and winning the heart of its lead singer, played by Beyonce. In speaking to blackfilm.com, Foxx talks about his character being compared to Berry Gordy, working with such a wonderful cast, and going on tour to do his musical thing.

How did you get your hair to look like that?

Jamie Foxx: My sister did it, my sister get all the wigs man! She came up with some ideas that was hot man! And I’ve always wanted my sister to get into the business you know, and she got in through ‘Ray’, and then all of a sudden, she had a hundred, two hundred heads to do in a week. Yeah, she put it down man, she got some tricks, I don’t want to tell her tricks man, but she got some tricks. I had homies coming up to me and being like, ‘hey foxy!’

So let’s talk about the process of you going for this role, not knowing if it was going to be made.

JF: They came to me but it was like, I didn’t know who was in it yet, but I blew it, because I said I liked the film, and my agents called me and said you can’t do that, cause we’re trying to negotiate, and I didn’t want to clip my agent, cause my agent works great for me, but then when I found out Eddie was in it I said, ‘that’s a no brainer’, Beyonce was in it, ‘that’s a no brainer’, Jamie Foxx, who I think she had it up her sleeve that she was getting ready to steal this movie the whole time. But it was like, ‘ I gotta be a part of it’

Was it strange to do a role where you play that unlikable character for the first time in a movie?

JF: That’s funny, you know what’s funny, is that we live in an artistic world now, where your persona is so connected to your characters that you play in movies, and so what I said- Bill Condon even asked me, do you think Curtis is too mean? Should we make him likeable? And I said, if you do that, now you’re going away from what the character really is, and I think Curtis is the sacrificed bunt for the rest of the characters, I’ll sacrifice the Jamie Foxx hottness for a minute, because if you don’t play characters like Curtis unforgiving, then the struggle of Jamie Foxx, and the struggle of Beyonce, and Eddie Murphy, you soften it. And we all got Curtises in our life, someone telling you, ‘you ain’t gonna do this, you ain’t gonna do that’ and you kind of log that into the back of your mind, and so Curtis had to be that. I mean there were certain things that I did, even off camera that was terrible to Beyonce. When I tell you, I was terrible! But I knew that if I came at her tough, that it would create this sort of thing that she would be able to- because it has to be real, and if you don’t feel that it’s real, then you won’t catch it. And even another thing too, you can’t deny that Beyonce is larger than life, you can’t deny that Eddie Murphy is larger than life, so if Curtis slams Eddie Murphy and the character at the same time, that’s what makes it more effective, so that’s why I think it was important to play him that way.

So what did you do to Beyonce?

JF: There were some things that I said at the dinner table that they didn’t put on, like when the camera was just on her, and it was just some things that I did and after it was over I would say, ‘are you good?’, but she felt that it helped her, so it was..you know what I’m saying, that Curtis guy was something else. But I gotta put this in it- like my friend was watching the screening and he was like, ‘Foxx, the girls when they were walking out, they were like, I’m going to slap the shit out of Jamie Foxx! I’m gonna slap Jamie Foxx when I see him! He was just so mean!’ and then, I would run into the executives; ‘Curtis is misunderstood. He’s a great guy, I mean he provided an opportunity for these people, and that’s what’s weird, they actually and that was the thing that opened my eyes, and saw, Curtis really is an artist to them, he’s an artist in the sense of, taking this crazy business and holding it together, and I guess the way you hold it together is by being, like scary.

Some people thought this was pre Ike Turner

JF: Yeah, yeah, it had a little bit of that in him, but I think it’s necessary for him

Now you talk about Jennifer stealing this movie, at what point did you realize...

JF: The first time she said her line to me and didn’t break at all. And she was like, ‘yeah whatever, well what you gonna do about it huh?’ And I was like, damn she is ready, like ‘I don’t give a damn if you’re Jamie Foxx, I don’t give a damn who you are right now, I’m about to take this!’ And that was great to see, to see her rise up to that, and Bill Condon worked with her, to get her tougher, because she’s country calm, she’s a country girl, but she’s a nice country girl. But he was able to get the ‘sister girl’ out of her, and when that song comes, forget about it, you gonna fly up out the theater.

How much did you know of the original show, and how often did you listen to the music, before taping started?

JF: Well, here’s the thing, we listened to the music, and what you can’t get around, is the song. Jennifer Holiday when she sung the song, and when you find out what the play is about, even without being able to see the play because of being young at the time you knew that this movie had the capabilities of being incredible, if Bill Condon, which he did, nails the drama and the music at the same time.

Now you’re in the music business, and now obviously doing this movie and knowing the story and how it relates to The Supremes and so forth, and I’m assuming hopefully, you know Berry Gordon,-

JF: But this character is not about Berry Gordy. It’s not about Berry Gordy at all, this character is made up of different music people that I’ve met in the industry in the past 3 years. Berry Gordy did something that nobody pointed out. Berry Gordy said, if we’re gonna get this black music into the white world, we’re going to have to do it in an eloquent way. So we’re gonna have etiquette class, we’re gonna teach you how to conduct an interview, we’re going to teach you how to dance- so they did a lot of things in forming those artists, and Berry had to have endearing qualities about him, or else he wouldn’t have lasted as long as he did, especially at that time.

Your co-stars have mentioned the fact that you were sort of a mentor, whether it was playful teasing or helping them learn Christian music from Beyonce, was it something you consciously did? Were you trying to help the newcomers out?

JF: Well, I mean, yeah it was done to me, when I worked with Al Pacino he brought me up in his trailer and said, ‘We really need to go over the script, Wally’s gonna be mad’. And he opened up and told me what Godfather was like, and how he was in Scarface, and it was just great to have that. You know, I’m not the ‘come to me children, and I will tell you how it goes’, it wasn’t like that it was just like, if you saw somebody that might need a ‘hey man, try that’, or whatever, but not to get in their way and try to be like ‘I know all’, because they had their own thing, these guys are completely, they don’t need me to tell them they’re talented, they’re talented.

This is the second time you’ve been in a film towards the end of the year that has generated a lot of Oscar buzz and features black talent, what do you think that does for the industry?

JF: Oh, it does great things for the industry, it’s one of the most diverse, when we went to Ray Charles, people whispered, ‘do we have to say African American when you talk about this film because it’s really Americana’ and I was like, no no no, you have to say ‘black film’ and I’ll tell you why, not black as in skin, but black as in business. If Ray Charles is commercially successful and critically successful, then he can produce a black film, and now you have something to reference, because Ray Charles did it ,now it makes it easier to make the film ‘Dreamgirls’, and now you’re eating pizza. And what I mean by that is that when you’re eating pizza you don’t think, ‘oh I’m eating Italian’, you just eat pizza. So now ‘Dreamgirls’ is pizza now, people are eating it and nobody really questions, that wow its an all black cast, and that’s what’s beautiful about it because, now its business work, and that’s why its importnat.

How ironic is it that within the last 3 years between Ray Charles, Hustle and Flow and Dreamgirls, music is the factor?

JF: Yeah, but I think music connects all of it, we haven’t gotten into music here lately, of course there was musicals back in the day when you would see Danny K, ‘I am Hans Christian Andersen’

So is that you’re next role?

JF: Yes....as a matter of fact. Danny K...no, but now that you see the success of it, music fuels a lot of things, you can do a lot with music, it’s such a good match.

Have you encountered any Curtises in your own life? Now, assuming your choices are much wider than they were 15 years ago, but when you were starting out, was there anything you wanted to do that was more true to your soul, as opposed to the path you took?

JF: Well yeah, there’s always that, even now there’s always that, there’s always someone there, maybe not as dominant as Curtis, but someone there telling you, like this is the business of it, and you have to pay attention to them, because I am an artist, and I will wind up living in the village somewhere, with some hardwood floors, playing the a one stringed banjo, bongos, and be like, ‘oh this is the lick!’ But then Marcus would be like, ‘man if you don’t get your ass out of here and do something..’.because I’m an artist, I’m an artist to the core, you know and I can appreciate art in everything, but you know you need someone that is paying attention to your business to enable you to keep doing your art.

So how do you go about choosing your projects? How do you chose between doing an action film like Stealth and then do ‘Dreamgirls’?

JF: I’m just trying to hold on! I’m trying to stay in the movie game, you know what I mean? You have to do certain things like that before the Ray Charles thing, but now what you do is, and my agents are great at this too, we look at the arc of the character, because now you can do an independent film if you want to, and be cool with that, you can do a big film if you want to, just make sure they’re smart now, and you’re getting those smart ideas, and now you just have to manage it. What I like to do, and this is another thing about persona, for me to be in the movie and to play Eddie Murphy’s character, that would have been too much, for Jamie Foxx, the persona you know, that would be like dude, you’re doing too much right now, and so for me to be in the movie, but kind of be behind it a little bit won’t work, so now you’re able to switch your gears, if you can’t find a movie project, you can go out on the road and do stand-up for a couple of months, or there’s a hot song you can do a collaboration on, so now you can kind of cross your fingers and take your time on what you’re picking.

What do you mean you’re ‘doing too much’?

JF: Well, too much in this, ever since I got the internet and got a Myspace account, JamieFoxx@myspace.com, what I’ve noticed is the access that they have, that we have to entertainers. It’s non-stop. You see something about an entertainer every time you go on the internet, and it’s to the point that you almost forget what they do. It’s like damn, what does he do? Sing? Act? What do they do? So you have to pay attention to your persona, because being a celebrity nowadays is all about managing that perception. So, you did the AMAs, you did the BET awards, you did this, you did that, and in a certain while you start to become....in fact I think it was Paul Mooney who did the joke about it, ‘I’m so sick of Jamie Foxx, I see him too much, I see him everywhere I go. He’s on this, and he’s on that, I looked on my license, and he was on that too!’ So you have to pay attention to that, just a little bit, and you maybe you know what I’m saying is that sometimes when you are in people’s faces a little too much, they be like, hmm I don’t want to go see your movie right now, because I see you all day every day in my home.

How were you at singing the songs? Did you hold back? What is it that Bill Condon wanted you to do when you sang?

JF: Oh, this is what I did, without even telling Bill Condon, I went into the studio and I wanted to sing my song one time, because I felt that Curtis is not the artist, he’s the manager so he should have a little bit of a flaw, he’s the guy who can’t execute the dream, he’s the guy who can only do his part, so that way, you get sort of a difference. Everybody else could be that, but I wanted to be the manager singing. Like if you catch the manager singing, you’d be like, ‘damn, what is that you singing?’ You know? ‘What is that?’ Oh....anyway, so I wanted Curtis to be like anyway, so his ode to Beyonce, I mean his ode to Dina is like, you know I don’t do this, but if I gotta sing, to keep you here...’when I first saw you...’ it almost drives you...

Now was that always a solo in the film? Cause it was a duet in the play.

JF: I don’t know, on the CD it is a duet, but I guess he chose for it to be like this.

What’s next for you Jamie?

JF: I’m gonna go on this tour, December 26th make sure you see my myspace, JamieFoxx@myspace.com, I’ve got all that information on myself, Fantasia and Snoop Doggy Dogg, if he’s not incarcerated he’s gonna be on the tour.

How about movie- wise?

JF: Movie -wise, Kingdom is coming out sometime soon, and then I’m gonna play the back.

DREAMGIRLS: An Interview with Jamie Foxx
By Wilson Morales

December 11, 2006

Not since Will Smith came from the TV world, has an actor captured and taken the film industry by storm other than Jamie Foxx. When you look back, he was the last added member to “In Living Color”, which had Jim Carrey as well and the infamous Wayans family. From there, Foxx went on do small bits and comedic performances such as “Booty Call” and “The Players Club”, but it wasn’t until he co-starred in “Any Given Sunday” that folks started to take notice. While he kept his day job as the star of his sitcom show, “The Jamie Foxx show”, Foxx continued to make some noise in the film industry, especially when his next dramatic performance was as Drem ‘Bundini” Brown, opposite Will Smith in “Ali”. In 2004, Foxx would break records as he would be the first Black to be nominated twice in the lead category for film and television for his work in “Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story” and “Ray”, the Ray Charles. Foxx would eventually win the Best Actor Oscar and join Denzel Washington and Sidney Poitier as the only Black men to hold that honor. This past summer, we saw Foxx play Rico Tubbs in the film version of “Miami Vice” and now Foxx is playing the role of Curtis Taylor Jr., in the most anticipated film of the year, “Dreamgirls”. Not to mention that Foxx released a CD last year that was critically acclaimed. In the film, Curtis is compared to Motown Records founder Berry Gordy, where his character finds a trio of women and makes them into an overnight sensation, and winning the heart of its lead singer, played by Beyonce. In speaking to blackfilm.com, Foxx talks about his character being compared to Berry Gordy, working with such a wonderful cast, and going on tour to do his musical thing.

How did you get your hair to look like that?

Jamie Foxx: My sister did it, my sister get all the wigs man! She came up with some ideas that was hot man! And I’ve always wanted my sister to get into the business you know, and she got in through ‘Ray’, and then all of a sudden, she had a hundred, two hundred heads to do in a week. Yeah, she put it down man, she got some tricks, I don’t want to tell her tricks man, but she got some tricks. I had homies coming up to me and being like, ‘hey foxy!’

So let’s talk about the process of you going for this role, not knowing if it was going to be made.

JF: They came to me but it was like, I didn’t know who was in it yet, but I blew it, because I said I liked the film, and my agents called me and said you can’t do that, cause we’re trying to negotiate, and I didn’t want to clip my agent, cause my agent works great for me, but then when I found out Eddie was in it I said, ‘that’s a no brainer’, Beyonce was in it, ‘that’s a no brainer’, Jamie Foxx, who I think she had it up her sleeve that she was getting ready to steal this movie the whole time. But it was like, ‘ I gotta be a part of it’

Was it strange to do a role where you play that unlikable character for the first time in a movie?

JF: That’s funny, you know what’s funny, is that we live in an artistic world now, where your persona is so connected to your characters that you play in movies, and so what I said- Bill Condon even asked me, do you think Curtis is too mean? Should we make him likeable? And I said, if you do that, now you’re going away from what the character really is, and I think Curtis is the sacrificed bunt for the rest of the characters, I’ll sacrifice the Jamie Foxx hottness for a minute, because if you don’t play characters like Curtis unforgiving, then the struggle of Jamie Foxx, and the struggle of Beyonce, and Eddie Murphy, you soften it. And we all got Curtises in our life, someone telling you, ‘you ain’t gonna do this, you ain’t gonna do that’ and you kind of log that into the back of your mind, and so Curtis had to be that. I mean there were certain things that I did, even off camera that was terrible to Beyonce. When I tell you, I was terrible! But I knew that if I came at her tough, that it would create this sort of thing that she would be able to- because it has to be real, and if you don’t feel that it’s real, then you won’t catch it. And even another thing too, you can’t deny that Beyonce is larger than life, you can’t deny that Eddie Murphy is larger than life, so if Curtis slams Eddie Murphy and the character at the same time, that’s what makes it more effective, so that’s why I think it was important to play him that way.

So what did you do to Beyonce?

JF: There were some things that I said at the dinner table that they didn’t put on, like when the camera was just on her, and it was just some things that I did and after it was over I would say, ‘are you good?’, but she felt that it helped her, so it was..you know what I’m saying, that Curtis guy was something else. But I gotta put this in it- like my friend was watching the screening and he was like, ‘Foxx, the girls when they were walking out, they were like, I’m going to slap the shit out of Jamie Foxx! I’m gonna slap Jamie Foxx when I see him! He was just so mean!’ and then, I would run into the executives; ‘Curtis is misunderstood. He’s a great guy, I mean he provided an opportunity for these people, and that’s what’s weird, they actually and that was the thing that opened my eyes, and saw, Curtis really is an artist to them, he’s an artist in the sense of, taking this crazy business and holding it together, and I guess the way you hold it together is by being, like scary.

Some people thought this was pre Ike Turner

JF: Yeah, yeah, it had a little bit of that in him, but I think it’s necessary for him

Now you talk about Jennifer stealing this movie, at what point did you realize...

JF: The first time she said her line to me and didn’t break at all. And she was like, ‘yeah whatever, well what you gonna do about it huh?’ And I was like, damn she is ready, like ‘I don’t give a damn if you’re Jamie Foxx, I don’t give a damn who you are right now, I’m about to take this!’ And that was great to see, to see her rise up to that, and Bill Condon worked with her, to get her tougher, because she’s country calm, she’s a country girl, but she’s a nice country girl. But he was able to get the ‘sister girl’ out of her, and when that song comes, forget about it, you gonna fly up out the theater.

How much did you know of the original show, and how often did you listen to the music, before taping started?

JF: Well, here’s the thing, we listened to the music, and what you can’t get around, is the song. Jennifer Holiday when she sung the song, and when you find out what the play is about, even without being able to see the play because of being young at the time you knew that this movie had the capabilities of being incredible, if Bill Condon, which he did, nails the drama and the music at the same time.

Now you’re in the music business, and now obviously doing this movie and knowing the story and how it relates to The Supremes and so forth, and I’m assuming hopefully, you know Berry Gordon,-

JF: But this character is not about Berry Gordy. It’s not about Berry Gordy at all, this character is made up of different music people that I’ve met in the industry in the past 3 years. Berry Gordy did something that nobody pointed out. Berry Gordy said, if we’re gonna get this black music into the white world, we’re going to have to do it in an eloquent way. So we’re gonna have etiquette class, we’re gonna teach you how to conduct an interview, we’re going to teach you how to dance- so they did a lot of things in forming those artists, and Berry had to have endearing qualities about him, or else he wouldn’t have lasted as long as he did, especially at that time.

Your co-stars have mentioned the fact that you were sort of a mentor, whether it was playful teasing or helping them learn Christian music from Beyonce, was it something you consciously did? Were you trying to help the newcomers out?

JF: Well, I mean, yeah it was done to me, when I worked with Al Pacino he brought me up in his trailer and said, ‘We really need to go over the script, Wally’s gonna be mad’. And he opened up and told me what Godfather was like, and how he was in Scarface, and it was just great to have that. You know, I’m not the ‘come to me children, and I will tell you how it goes’, it wasn’t like that it was just like, if you saw somebody that might need a ‘hey man, try that’, or whatever, but not to get in their way and try to be like ‘I know all’, because they had their own thing, these guys are completely, they don’t need me to tell them they’re talented, they’re talented.

This is the second time you’ve been in a film towards the end of the year that has generated a lot of Oscar buzz and features black talent, what do you think that does for the industry?

JF: Oh, it does great things for the industry, it’s one of the most diverse, when we went to Ray Charles, people whispered, ‘do we have to say African American when you talk about this film because it’s really Americana’ and I was like, no no no, you have to say ‘black film’ and I’ll tell you why, not black as in skin, but black as in business. If Ray Charles is commercially successful and critically successful, then he can produce a black film, and now you have something to reference, because Ray Charles did it ,now it makes it easier to make the film ‘Dreamgirls’, and now you’re eating pizza. And what I mean by that is that when you’re eating pizza you don’t think, ‘oh I’m eating Italian’, you just eat pizza. So now ‘Dreamgirls’ is pizza now, people are eating it and nobody really questions, that wow its an all black cast, and that’s what’s beautiful about it because, now its business work, and that’s why its importnat.

How ironic is it that within the last 3 years between Ray Charles, Hustle and Flow and Dreamgirls, music is the factor?

JF: Yeah, but I think music connects all of it, we haven’t gotten into music here lately, of course there was musicals back in the day when you would see Danny K, ‘I am Hans Christian Andersen’

So is that you’re next role?

JF: Yes....as a matter of fact. Danny K...no, but now that you see the success of it, music fuels a lot of things, you can do a lot with music, it’s such a good match.

Have you encountered any Curtises in your own life? Now, assuming your choices are much wider than they were 15 years ago, but when you were starting out, was there anything you wanted to do that was more true to your soul, as opposed to the path you took?

JF: Well yeah, there’s always that, even now there’s always that, there’s always someone there, maybe not as dominant as Curtis, but someone there telling you, like this is the business of it, and you have to pay attention to them, because I am an artist, and I will wind up living in the village somewhere, with some hardwood floors, playing the a one stringed banjo, bongos, and be like, ‘oh this is the lick!’ But then Marcus would be like, ‘man if you don’t get your ass out of here and do something..’.because I’m an artist, I’m an artist to the core, you know and I can appreciate art in everything, but you know you need someone that is paying attention to your business to enable you to keep doing your art.

So how do you go about choosing your projects? How do you chose between doing an action film like Stealth and then do ‘Dreamgirls’?

JF: I’m just trying to hold on! I’m trying to stay in the movie game, you know what I mean? You have to do certain things like that before the Ray Charles thing, but now what you do is, and my agents are great at this too, we look at the arc of the character, because now you can do an independent film if you want to, and be cool with that, you can do a big film if you want to, just make sure they’re smart now, and you’re getting those smart ideas, and now you just have to manage it. WhatI like to do, and this is another thing about persona, for me to be in the movie and to play Eddie Murphy’s character, that would have been too much, for Jamie Foxx, the persona you know, that would be like dude, you’re doing too much right now, and so for me to be in the movie, but kind of be behind it a little bit won’t work, so now you’re able to switch your gears, if you can’t find a movie project, you can go out on the road and do stand-up for a couple of months, or there’s a hot song you can do a collaboration on, so now you can kind of cross your fingers and take your time on what you’re picking.

What do you mean you’re ‘doing too much’?

JF: Well, too much in this, ever since I got the internet and got a Myspace account, JamieFoxx@myspace.com, what I’ve noticed is the access that they have, that we have to entertainers. It’s non-stop. You see something about an entertainer every time you go on the internet, and it’s to the point that you almost forget what they do. It’s like damn, what does he do? Sing? Act? What do they do? So you have to pay attention to your persona, because being a celebrity nowadays is all about managing that perception. So, you did the AMAs, you did the BET awards, you did this, you did that, and in a certain while you start to become....in fact I think it was Paul Mooney who did the joke about it, ‘I’m so sick of Jamie Foxx, I see him too much, I see him everywhere I go. He’s on this, and he’s on that, I looked on my license, and he was on that too!’ So you have to pay attention to that, just a little bit, and you maybe you know what I’m saying is that sometimes when you are in people’s faces a little too much, they be like, hmm I don’t want to go see your movie right now, because I see you all day every day in my home.

How were you at singing the songs? Did you hold back? What is it that Bill Condon wanted you to do when you sang?

JF: Oh, this is what I did, without even telling Bill Condon, I went into the studio and I wanted to sing my song one time, because I felt that Curtis is not the artist, he’s the manager so he should have a little bit of a flaw, he’s the guy who can’t execute the dream, he’s the guy who can only do his part, so that way, you get sort of a difference. Everybody else could be that, but I wanted to be the manager singing. Like if you catch the manager singing, you’d be like, ‘damn, what is that you singing?’ You know? ‘What is that?’ Oh....anyway, so I wanted Curtis to be like anyway, so his ode to Beyonce, I mean his ode to Dina is like, you know I don’t do this, but if I gotta sing, to keep you here...’when I first saw you...’ it almost drives you...

Now was that always a solo in the film? Cause it was a duet in the play.

JF: I don’t know, on the CD it is a duet, but I guess he chose for it to be like this.

What’s next for you Jamie?

JF: I’m gonna go on this tour, December 26th make sure you see my myspace, JamieFoxx@myspace.com, I’ve got all that information on myself, Fantasia and Snoop Doggy Dogg, if he’s not incarcerated he’s gonna be on the tour.

How about movie- wise?

JF: Movie -wise, Kingdom is coming out sometime soon, and then I’m gonna play the back.