TORONTO - Jamie Foxx starts right in. No greeting. No welcome. He walks into the room and registers your face, shakes your hand, and all at once says, "You were there last night, right? It was an historical moment. We started out at a club, a small gathering of friends and sort of blossomed, shall we say, into a raucous ... you know." He's being somewhat facetious but he says it with conviction, and I nod. "Well, it was beautiful." He's talking about the after-party for the premiere of Ray, his biopic about the Genius of Soul, Ray Charles, that opens Friday.

This conversation happened around Labor Day at the Toronto International Film Festival. "We walk inside this place," he goes on, not sliding back in his chair and giving his stump speech about his new movie, the way movie stars do. He sits forward. This is what he wants to talk about. "Everybody is having a great time. Then it turned into a TV show called Foxx After Dark. I'm standing on the piano. I see Kevin Spacey. Which to me, let's me know you're down. Know what I'm saying? Tom Cruise showed up at my birthday party. That means he's down. You show, you're down. Because there are always elements at my parties."

He holds for the laugh.

"Elements meaning good elements. We get Mr. Spacey on stage and he goes into the mic: 'Ah, hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-ho!' The crowd goes nuts. Then he goes into 'Splish Splash,' the crowd got into it, and if you weren't there you missed something historical. You were there, right?"

Sigh. No. Working.

"Well, it was historical."

To be specific: It was all over the Toronto newspapers that morning, too. How Foxx and entourage ran up $13,000 bar tabs. How Foxx and Co. were a traveling party. How Foxx had the ability to launch into a spot-on impersonation of anyone, from Tom Cruise to Quincy Jones to Bill Cosby, without breaking stride. How his portrayal of Ray Charles had already put him on the short list for a best actor Oscar. How he was charming the city, and how invitations to his party instructed invitees to "dress spectacular." And how they did, and how Foxx leaped on stage with Spacey, and how they brought down the house with dueling impersonations of musical obsessions.

But the party was the thing.

Not the music, not so much.

Because no one blinked that a movie star could come off like a rock star. There was a time when a movie star didn't want to be a music star, and a music star didn't want to be a movie star. But that line is fuzzy in our post-MTV, post-J. Lo era. There was a day when Val Kilmer could do a Jim Morrison, or Gary Busey could impersonate Buddy Holly, or further back, Jimmy Stewart could play Glenn Miller, and then move on with their careers.

No more.

Now it would seem almost a shame if Foxx didn't have some musical talent. And so earlier this year Foxx topped the charts as part of a collaboration with Kayne West on Twista's hit, "Slow Jamz"; he also made an album in 1994 and has a new one, "Ambidextrous," arriving next year. The trouble comes when you start playing the music of a whole other demographic.

Ask Spacey. His musical obsession was '60s crooner Bobby Darin, whose life story he tried for a decade to get made, before giving up on Hollywood and heading to Germany, and, with European money, directing Beyond the Sea, the Bobby Darin story, entirely outside the United States. It opens later this year.

As for Ray - similar story.

The irony is, if Jamie Foxx had a dime for every profile that mentioned his fondness for having a good time, he would have been able to fund Ray himself.

That job, instead, fell to a Denver billionaire named Philip Anschutz. Fifteen years ago director Taylor Hackford acquired the rights to the life story of Charles, who died of liver failure in June. Hackford was told to make a TV miniseries. He resisted. "There are many rags-to-riches stories in America," the filmmaker said. "But I don't think anybody did it quite the way Ray Charles did."

Hackford tried for a co-financing deal between Anschutz and a studio. None would bite, so Anschutz put up $33 million of his own money. The way Hackford tells it, when Foxx was cast, the billionaire flew in to see him do his impression, to see what his $33 million would buy.

Simply: Anschutz bought the kind of earnest, reverential movie biography that wins awards. (Universal jumped in later as the distributor.) And Foxx, coming off his summer hit with Tom Cruise, Collateral, ended up with what could become a signature role - displaying the sacrifice and commitment Oscar adores.

At first Hackford wasn't convinced, just as Michael Mann wasn't convinced Foxx could play "Bundini" Brown, Muhammad Ali's corner man in Ali. Then Foxx bulked up, going from 185 to 220 pounds for the role, a supporting part. For Ray, he would go blind, so to speak. Lose weight. And worse yet, have to play alongside Ray and get the singer's blessing.

He'd also have to learn to carry a film. I say that and it reminds Foxx of something Cruise told him during the making of Collateral. Cruise knew that this was Foxx's moment to shine. He said that other stars, bigger stars than he was at one time, like Dustin Hoffman and Paul Newman, had given him room when they had a showier part, and now he'd let Foxx eat some scenery, too. "Go ahead, he said. Eat, young man."

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Back to that hypenate business. Foxx, 36, was a musician-comedian way before he was a thespian-musician. The piano playing was no stretch. He grew up Eric Bishop in Terrell, Texas, outside Dallas, "a six-stoplight town," he says. His grandmother, who adopted him as an infant from his parents, who were divorced, insisted he play the piano. He started at age 6. By 14 he was leading his town's gospel choir. "My favorite Ray Charles song back then," he says, "was 'Georgia on My Mind,' one of the classier songs and one of the simpler songs to play. He has better songs, but that one you wanted to learn because you wanted to have it in your repertoire, use it when you started - and my whole career was supposed to be all about music."

The next decade or so blur. He attended the United States International University in San Diego on a piano scholarship. A dare got him on stage at a comedy club. That parlayed into a slot on In Living Color, then a sitcom on the WB. He made a handful of B-movies like Booty Call. And then came Oliver Stone and Any Given Sunday, and a new career direction - one roughly based on the way Tom Hanks climbed from Bosom Buddies to stardom.

Right down to the doubts.

"When I met with Jamie," Hackford remembers, "I said to him, 'Look, I don't know if you can do this. Ray weighed 157 pounds.' He said, 'OK, I'll be 157 pounds.' And he lost the weight. I suggested he go blind for the role, using prosthetics on his eyes. He agreed. A lot of actors would say fine and do it for a day. Jamie stayed blind for a month."

Eventually, Foxx says, tiny slits were cut into the bottoms of the eye prosthetics, modeled on the way Charles' own eyes were sealed in an accident when he was a child. "One day I walked in to dub some lines and I see the screen way in the back and I think to myself that Taylor spliced in footage of Ray Charles. The closer I got, the more I realized it was me. And that was the idea, for me to just disappear. It became a matter of getting the nuance of Ray and tailoring it, as opposed to an impersonation."

In the film, Foxx lip-syncs to Charles when he's singing, but the rest is an eerily accurate approximation of the legend's buoyantly scruffy voice. "I paid attention to the fact we're telling his story in the earlier part of his career. I took that DNA and tried to match his voice as he got older in the film. I paid attention to how he would talk to his wife, how he'd order food and talk to his kids, how he'd get mad differently than people do. He had to internalize a lot of emotions."

Hackford says Charles told him not to sugarcoat his history of heroin addiction or philandering. "It was the greatest gift to give. He said, 'I'm no angel, I don't want to be seen as no angel.' "

Foxx had a harder time.

He met Charles "just for a bit," for fear he would start playing him as he was an old man. "Everybody has a sort of shield up," Foxx said. "They don't want to tell people what they really think. So I would ask Ray: 'You know, Ray, I heard you had a lot of women, Ray.' We wanted a real story, so we had to ask. He would say, 'No.' I'd say, 'Ray, they tell me ... ' He'd interrupt: 'Oh, no. No one.' And then after a while, he would open up: 'Well, there was this one girl.' And that one girl turned into a few girls, and then we would really have a chance to find out what he was all about.

"I mean, he called women 'bobby soxers.' And when he was playing, they didn't have to go out and buy his record or wait for his video to come on. He was right there. They went right up to him, there was a lot of, um .●.●. "

Appreciation for the man?

"That's right. Appreciation."

Crunch time came when Foxx finally had to play with Charles. He sat on the piano bench, and they started playing blues, funk, standards, nothing special. As many times as Foxx has told this story, he relishes it once more.

"We started playing a groove. We started singing back and forth with each other. He said if you can play the blues you can do anything. I said 'Right.' Then he went into Thelonious Monk.

"It was crazy. I'm not a huge jazz person. But at the same time you want to do your best. Everything was fine until I play something and he stops and says, 'Now why would you do that?' And he was serious about it. We're having a great time, now he's asking me, 'Why would you do that?' I looked at him and I said, 'I don't know why I did it.'

"He said, 'The notes are right underneath your fingers.' That was his metaphor for life. Everybody's note is underneath their fingers. All you have to do is take time and find the right notes. You play whatever music you're supposed to play in life. And he grilled me. But then he jumped up eventually and he hugged himself and said, 'This kid's got it!' And then he walked off into the sunset, know what I mean? It was amazing. It was amazing."

Contact Christopher Borrelli at: cborrelli@theblade.com

or 419-724-6117.

First Published October 27, 2004, 12:24 p.m.