With Mason’s dad, Cuba Gooding Jr., being a household name I wondered if Mason felt any pressure to live up to his example when he started his career. Although he’s earned his roles in his own right, you do wonder if being the child of a well-known face is more a help or hindrance.

“He’s done an amazing job, in tandem with my mother, who is my rock and my foundation, both of them. When it comes to my personal life he’s never made me feel as if there was pressure to live up to anything, and I think that’s just carried over and echoed throughout my professional life. He is an impeccable actor, and he’s found a way to convert general charisma into character study, finding every nuance of a character’s emotion. He always said, it starts with a walk, you got to find out how they move their bodies and then the insights for the rest of their character. I hope aspects of what makes him so talented and amazing come through in my performances, but I think I am a different type of actor or a different type of performer or artist than he is, so the pressure to me is mostly attributed to my desire to uphold what is a storied legacy of a great performer. He’s always said, for better and for worse, all you have is your word and your name and that’s something I take very seriously, I want people to hear the name Gooding or Mason Gooding or anyone in my family or my circle, and think of it only with the utmost of respect.

Any pressure I feel in my career is just to make sure that when people talk to me, or they interact with me, or they see my work, it reflects positively on the rest of my family and the people that I associate with so that at the end of the day, I know that I’ve done my little part to make sure that people are entertained, they feel seen, happy, appreciated, because that’s all I care about. I just want to make art for other people and to make them feel, that sounds altruistic, but I feel like if I did do it solely for myself I’d have quit long before I got my first rejection. The best motivator is to make sure people enjoy it. At the end of the day, you can succeed on your own all you want but if you don’t have other people to share it with, and embrace that success, then to me it doesn’t mean as much. Don’t get me wrong, being self-motivated is important as well. My dad’s good at doing that, he’s good at teaching. I hope I can do some stuff on my own at this point. He does do a great job of allowing me to find my way through my career and navigate the industry on my own. He would say at the end of the day, no matter what people assume, having the name of Gooding doesn’t mean you can be a puppet while you’re on set, you’re gonna have to carry your weight. Knock on wood, but I certainly try my best, and that, at the end of the day all that I can do.”

Now horror is a genre of film I have actively avoided in the past, but I find myself promising Mason I will (bravely) tackle the latest instalment of the Scream franchise to catch him take on his latest role. It will probably be something I think twice about closer to the time but will all the hype behind the 5th outing I figure it may be worth not going anywhere in the dark for days afterwards.

“Production wrapped in November of last year. I really couldn’t be more excited for people to see it. Scream and Wes Craven, who originally made the first one, had something to say about the entertainment people so readily consumed at the time and for those who aren’t a big horror fan a lot of that satire maybe go over their heads. What Wes pulled off so effortlessly with the original Scream, was a marriage of new concepts. Something fresh that people hadn’t seen, some things that played on those familiar tropes that allowed people to feel comfortable, a more nuanced sort of setting, while also working to subvert those expectations and scaring the sh*t out of them. This is why I’d say if you aren’t a big fan of the horror genre, Scream is a rough one to get stuck in with, because it’s scary, but it’s also why I’m telling you there’s a lot of comedy in it. I don’t think you’ll regret watching it because it is in equal parts horrifying, as well as exciting, engaging, interesting, and compelling. And I feel like, regardless of your thoughts on horror, and how that makes you feel, they all lead with this level of confidence in entertainment first that makes the story engaging, as well as scary, as well as hilarious. And you’ll have to let me know if we pull that off.”

I’ve always ascertained that comedy and horror are much closer in terms of genre conventions than any other genres or mediums considering the level of care and thought that has to go into timing, either for jokes or for scares. It is very closely related. The way that you set something up has a payoff. And in the case of great comedy and great horror, that payoff either grows  or carries throughout an entire sequence. Wes and the amazing writing team pulled that together and that has remained throughout all five iterations. He’s taken horror and comedy and he found a way to marry them both and make it this double whammy of exciting, hilarious, horrific content. I can’t speak highly enough of the people that have made this next movie, it speaks for itself. They are brilliant. And Scream Five is just another notch on that belt of brilliance.”

Mason is one of these individuals that have the power to making you feel at ease instantly. So we got on to the conversation of our struggles with mental health over the years very easily. “It’s a loaded statement, as it is, considering the pandemic we’ve had. I feel like the idea of isolation and loneliness that people subject themselves to simply based on a social perception that they need to suffer in silence, or they need to do things alone... I feel you have a generation of all ages, who have shared trauma that I certainly wasn’t subjected to. And while I would consider myself at the base a very positive and happy-go-lucky guy, when faced with such prolonged periods of isolation or social ostracization, through social distancing and whatnot, I discovered that I have this proclivity for I’ll call it like a negative self-reflection and anxiety that I hadn’t been privy to before the year 2020. And now, through an understanding of a shared experience that many people have had, I’ve realised that talking about those things, especially with people that have experienced similar trauma, or similar experiences can benefit greatly, especially if you find that you feel a certain way about yourself about your circumstances and don’t necessarily know the root cause of it.

Either talking to a professional or someone that you trust, for me at least did leaps and bounds for my mental health in my sort of personal situation. Beyond that my most memorable, I’ll say, moment in terms of understanding mental health is, I noticed when I interact with people, specifically, in vulnerable settings, maybe one on one, that people are so willing to enact a level of self-deprecation or self verbal self-harm to themselves, in a means to connect with other people as if putting themselves down. Interestingly, people feel that they need to put themselves down to connect with others as if that’s the shared experience when I feel rather than allowing other people to speak negatively about themselves and attend in an attempt to connect, I’d rather start a conversation on a positive foot. That’s what I love and it’s rare on social media, but the moments you get where people leave with positivity and compliments to one another or speaking highly of someone that they’re interacting with that they maybe haven’t, all that often, to me is so much more uplifting and beneficial than what I think has been pretty rampant that people will bond over this mutual negativity.

I’d love to see a switch in the social dynamic that rather than normalizing hurtful or negative rhetoric, that people are much more comfortable complimenting one another. And that also plays into receiving compliments because I can’t tell you how many times either in a dating setting or an amicable social setting a compliment will throw someone off way more than an insult. Whereas people nowadays know how to combat an insult but when you say something about someone’s hair, or how lovely they look, it can catch them off guard to a point where it’s like, I don’t have a response to that. I don’t know what to say. That’s my hope just that after a prolonged period of isolation and loneliness that people will take from this time, despite their potential anxieties or social discomfort, that to lead with positivity is way more fulfilling than to allow a negative thought about yourself and other people to elude in the beginning stages of relationships.”