It’s quiet in the courtyard bar of London’s Corinthia hotel, no other guests around, just me and a couple of waiters who tinkle glasses and wash cutlery. Suddenly, boom, a Jeff Goldblum goes off – rearranging furniture, sending quotes flying. The 71-year-old actor prowls in, light on his feet, half-dancing as if to a jazzy soundtrack only he can hear. He has in his hand an outstretched iPhone. “I was just looking at all these pictures of you,” Goldblum explains by way of hello. He waves around the results of a Google image search. “These do not do justice to your prodigious hirsute scalp.”
By that he means my hair. Goldblum, I’ll quickly learn, is articulate to the point of distraction. He is a talented gusher of synonyms and metaphors. Later in our interview, he’ll describe this love of words as something of a foible: “I string too many unnecessary, repetitive, redundant words together. There I go again!” But for now, he points to my head and says, cheerfully, “That’s a curly endive salad if ever I saw one.”
His own endive salad, greying these days, is gelled back into a stylish grooved wedge. At 6ft 4in, Goldblum is used to people pointing out his height to him, as if it’s something he might not have noticed. “I say to them, ‘Yes! I know! I apologise! I’m like a parade float!’” Today he is dressed in black: black leather coat, black shirt, black trousers, black boots. His face is tanned and interestingly lined. Without prompting, he volunteers that he hasn’t had any cosmetic work done. “It’s kinda foolish to try to mask [your age]. To pretend just makes you look older and more foolish. Accept it. Present it.” He’s maybe going a little deaf in one ear, because he drags around a chair so that we’re packed-train-carriage close, our faces just a few feet apart.
When Goldblum puts his chunky dark glasses down on the table, I notice that his name is inscribed inside one of the arms in gold lettering. It turns out he has his own line of designer spectacles. “Yes,” he says gravely, then commands, “Don’t be intimidated.” He is like this; he gathers you into amusing conspiracies, he is intense, eccentric, laugh-out-loud funny, overfamiliar.
Hollywood directors seemed to have learned a long time ago that it’s best to lean into Goldblum’s extroverted tendencies, allowing him to meld with his characters rather than try to make him disappear inside them. Whether as a mathematician in Steven Spielberg’s immortal Jurassic Park movies, or as a scientist in Roland Emmerich’s disaster spectacle Independence Day, or as a bunch of brilliant oddballs for Wes Anderson, the characters Goldblum portrays are usually somewhere between 50% and 90% him. “I’m expressive. An available-to-myself type,” he explains of his acting method. “I have to make sure everything is on the surface and ready to be drawn from.”
In a coming movie adaptation of the musical Wicked, he plays the Wizard of Oz. On set, Goldblum sang impromptu jazz standards with co-star Arianna Grande (Glinda) to pass the time. We’ll have to wait until that movie is released in the autumn to be sure, but expect him to play his Wizard big, with winks to the audience and its long-fixed perceptions of him as a ham. Before Wicked comes out, he’ll star in Kaos, an ambitious new series on Netflix in which the story of the Greek gods is given a modern retelling. Goldblum is Zeus, a bejewelled, Gucci-tracksuited dandy who talks, walks and gestures much like Goldblum himself. I watched the impressive first few episodes while deep in my research about him and got the strong impression that Goldblum was sometimes wearing his own clothes on screen. Can that be true?
“Not really. But kind of.” He explains that his friend and stylist Andrew Vottero contributed a few pieces to the costume department. “When you see me take my throne in that kind of Elvis-y, Michael Jackson in Thriller, lightning bolt suit? Andrew found that. And you know the ring that is rather prominent?” Throughout the series, Goldblum wears a signet ring that is faced with an antique gold coin. It’s a family heirloom once belonging to Emilie, his wife of 10 years.
Ah, he sighs, put in mind of her: “Mrs Goldblum! Emilie Goldblum!” She and their two young sons are in the family home back in Los Angeles. He’s here in London to promote the Netflix show, missing breakfast times, outings, the boys’ piano lessons over which Goldblum, a talented pianist, likes to hover, “manning the metronome”, as he puts it. He was in his late 50s, twice divorced (from former co-stars Patricia Gaul and Geena Davis), when he met former gymnast Emilie in a fancy gym. He was in his 60s when they started talking about having children. I have read that when Emilie first said something like, “How about we get married and try for a baby?”, Goldblum responded, “How about we visit my therapist before we agree to anything?”
In the courtyard, with typical Jeffian verve, he tears off the story at high speed, with plenty of digressions along the way and, once, an apology for spitting. “Weddings! I was, like, I dunno. I avoid weddings … They’re not my favourite family or showbiz events … I’d been married a couple of other times. Had never had kids … It ain’t nothing to toss off or take lightly. You don’t want to mess it up … So far, it’s been delicious. And enlarging. And sobering. A good lighthouse.”
A lighthouse? “Well, y’know … I’m not nautical … But they help you find your way. They’re a guide of sorts.”
He picks up his phone again. The background image shows Goldblum and his sons in a hotel room in Portugal. Eight-year-old Charlie and seven-year-old River are poised either side of their father, about to attack him with pillows. In the picture, Goldblum is smiling while also shielding his groin. “I’m not trying to be funny. You have to protect yourself at all times, like they tell fighters in the ring.” Either Charlie or River has written a message over the image: TWO AGAINST ONE.
Goldblum’s patently delighted by this. By them. He wonders what they’ll be like when they’re older. “They say the whole oak tree is in the acorn,” he mutters, looking at the photograph. “It’s all in there. Somehow.”
* * *
He was an acorn himself in a town called West Homestead, Pennsylvania. His father Harold was a doctor. His mother Shirley was a broadcaster and entrepreneur. There weren’t many other Jews in town. The nearest city was Pittsburgh, but Goldblum and his sister Pamela hardly went there. Life was provincial. In the London courtyard, now, he waves his designer “Jeff” specs. He nods in the direction of an upstairs suite, where the manager of the hotel lends him the use of a grand piano to practise. Back in West Homestead in the 1950s and 60s, “I couldn’t have imagined these glasses. Or me in the suite … but a seed was there.” He suggests that he sometimes had the feeling of being encouraged into the future by the adult he would one day become. “As if I was talking to myself. Like I say, the acorn and the oak. It was a case of, ‘Get me out of here! [Find me] a respite from the provincial difficulties I’m having in my own little neighbourhood and school!’”
Those provincial difficulties, I start to say …
“Yes, sir,” Goldblum replies at once.
Did they include antisemitism?
“Huh?”
Antisemitism?
He pauses for a while. “Well. Yes. There was some. This was the 1950s. My dad was the doctor in town, serving the steelworking community. We were the only Jews in our school.” As a verbose, drama-loving kid, Goldblum felt like a social outcast at times, but every summer he would get to be among others like himself at a theatre camp that took in artistic children from around the region. “I needed a community of some kind … That was the difficulty to which I referred. I wasn’t thinking of antisemitism. But, yeah, there was an incident or two. ‘Jew.’ Jewish stuff. Which was unpleasant.”
Just a couple of weeks before our interview, Goldblum tells me, he went back to West Homestead for the first time in his adult life. He plays piano with a jazz band and they were booked for a gig in Pittsburgh. Goldblum grabbed the chance to visit the town where he was raised and when I ask why, he says, “Self-examination? I’m ripe for it, always. As much now as ever. I’m sure there’s never an end to it. No full closure … I like all manner of self-examination. It was part of the attraction of acting, early on.”
As a teenager he used to write on the steamy shower glass of the family bathroom: Please God let me be an actor. With hindsight it all seems to have happened seamlessly. He moved to New York for drama school. Before he’d graduated, he was cast in a hit Shakespeare play that won awards. The first movie he auditioned for was 1974’s Death Wish. He got that part and around then the director Robert Altman, who’d seen Goldblum on stage, invited him to take a small role in 1974’s California Split. Altman’s protege, Philip Kaufman, cast Goldblum in 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He has hardly stopped working since: as a man who turns into an insect in David Cronenberg’s 1986 movie The Fly, as those gobby theoreticians in two Independence Days and four Jurassic Parks. His IMDb page is stuffed to bursting. He seems surprised he’s listed as playing God, once, in a 2019 episode of a TV show called Happy. “I am? I’ve been lucky,” he says. “I’m getting lucky opportunities, now more than ever, in all areas.”
* * *
We talk again about Emilie. Long before he met her, she was a gymnast who competed for Canada at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. I ask Goldblum where he was in his life, in the year 2000, and he does some sums. He measures his life in hit films: “Well, let’s see … My maths! I was 48 years old. I’d done the first Jurassic Park in 93. Second Jurassic Park in the middle 90s. Independence Day, I think, had occurred. This is how I kind of red-letter-day my life, y’know?” Goldblum was dating an independent film-maker in 2000. They were out together on the campaign trail for Al Gore that summer. Did he ever sit down and watch the rhythmic gymnastics being broadcast from Australia?
“Nobody’s asked that,” Goldblum says. “I don’t believe so. But it could have happened. Ever see that Claude Lelouch movie, And Now My Love? It chronicles how, chance has it, these two people who seem to fall in love at first sight have really been the result of so many random almost-meetings.”
After her career as a gymnast ended, Emilie worked as a dancer and aerialist, appearing at the Grammys with Taylor Swift and body-doubling some of that brilliant, elevated Greenwich Conservatory waltz for Emma Stone in La La Land. She now runs a company that makes clothes for dancers. I ask Goldblum to compare the versions of himself before and after he met her in 2011.
“I feel a little wiser. Still, of course, the same Goldblum mania will occur.”
What sort of “Goldblum mania”?
“I don’t think I’ve ever said to anybody out loud. If anything, most everybody would get the impression that I’m doing well, that I’m comparatively stable, full of purpose and focus. But just between me and me? Let me see. Garden variety moments of anxiety, possibly.” He goes on to talk about sometimes running out of patience with his young sons and his frustration with himself about that. “They are primal. They’re experiencing raw, unexpurgated life. And in proximity to it, at least I find, I don’t know about you, things come up in me more readily and fully. Including temper.”
He talks about trying to get the balance right between guiding them and backing off, what he calls “the dance”. He talks about trying not to be a phoney around them and that creeping awareness, common as one’s children get older, that they’re seeing and noting everything about you “with absorptive, fresh and ready eyes. They see you. And whether you like it or not, you’re imprinting how they form and what they think life is.”
I ask Goldblum how he talks to his boys about masculinity and their behaviour as men in the world.
He thinks, pouting. “Off the top of my head, masculinity overlaps into good humanity, no matter what gender. Which is an ethical, honest and authentic morality; a contributive, caring kindness; a loving navigation through the world.” He prefers to ask a different question of his sons: “How do you be a good person?”
He’ll say to them, “‘Listen. I don’t want to step on your spirit, or suppress you, or hog-tie you. But you’re in this world. Don’t hurt each other. Take care of yourselves. Have regard for the gift of your own human life. Have regard and respect for the lives of others.’” He says he has a general approach to life that he cribbed from a book of philosophy by Sam Harris: “Always tell the truth. Don’t even go, ‘Hey! I love your sweater!’ Or don’t go backstage and say, ‘You were great, you were spectacular!’ Graciousness and elegance demand that sometimes you need to not tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, all the time, to everybody. You have to honour kindness over cruelty and be sensitive to somebody’s feelings. But don’t lie.”
This attitude of his emboldens me to ask about something awkward. I’m enjoying his company, this fast-talking, finger-jabbing, leaner-inner of a man, but Goldblum plays pretty fast and loose when it comes to personal space. Having dragged his chair very close at the start of the interview, there have been little prods and pats as he underscores his anecdotes and his conversational points. With his left hand, he strokes a white tablecloth beside us, as if in appreciation of its texture. With his right hand, while trying to hold on to a fast-escaping thought, he grabs my leg: “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I was gonna make a point. Now I forgot. Just a second, just a second.”
It seems to be a part of the 3D package of how Goldblum communicates, this incidental touching. I saw him interviewed on an American news channel by an experienced host, Ari Melber, back in 2022. At one point during their chaotic hour together, Goldblum asked to hold Melber’s hand to inspect his manicure. Later, when Melber jokingly queried why Goldblum had just struck him on the knee, Goldblum said, “It was available to me and I thought I’d hit it.”
You’re tactile, I say to Goldblum. Is it that you think you need to feel things to understand things?
“Probably so. Human beings do. I like to. I’m glad I have my vision. I certainly like to hear. Smelling is very important to me. I’m a big taster. And then last, I believe, is … Yes, I like how things feel. I do like to feel things.”
I ask Goldblum about how this works, given the changes in social and professional mores in recent years. In a time of reckoning about personal behaviour, have his own behaviours changed?
“On this [new Netflix] show we had an intimacy coordinator, because there are a couple of explicit scenes … As an actor, you shouldn’t get hurt, and you shouldn’t be frightened that the other actor is unsafe in some way. In scenes of fighting, you’ve gotta choreograph it. Likewise, all intimacies should be worked out. Everybody should be comfortable and feel safe. Absolutely. So there’s that. And that’s good.”
He continues, “And then in life … y’know, I’m glad there are boundaries, that’s what we’re talking about, that if you choose to exercise them are acknowledged and respected. That’s a good thing. For me. For everybody. You can imagine all the violations that have taken place that make life challenging for all sorts of people. We have to try to navigate our way through interaction. Which is a complicated, difficult thing. Treating each other the way you wanna be treated works out for everybody. Right? That’s obvious and not a bad thing.”
A bit later in our conversation, Goldblum returns to this moment unbidden and says, “If I’ve touched you in any way that’s inappropriate, please tell me.” We end up having another chat about boundaries in which we seem to agree there’s a distinction between pointing at someone in emphasis and prodding them. “You and I should do that Neil Simon show The Sunshine Boys,” Goldblum suggests. “They made a movie of it with George [Burns] and Walter Matthau. They’re old vaudevillians. A team. Now they hate each other. One complains, ‘When we’re on stage, if he starts that spitting’ – which I’ve also done to you – ‘if he starts poking me, I’m gonna cut that finger off!’ Just like me. The spitting and the poking. We could go into that scene right now.”
* * *
The interview zigs and zags. We talk about demagoguery in modern global politics, “the dummies, like Zeus, holding on to a position of authority and mistaking it for real power. They’re going to get their comeuppance sooner or later. Chickens come home to roost.” There are themes in the new Netflix show that seem especially potent, given the current parlous state of American politics. “With people in these falsely earned positions of authority, the question becomes for others: do they deserve to be in these positions of power over us, to have leverage over us? And if not, then if we’re bringing them down, when, how, who?” Goldblum doesn’t like to sound this serious for long, though, and soon he’s telling me apropos of nothing that I rather remind him of President Abraham Lincoln.
We end up talking about ageing and mortality. Goldblum clearly had a lot of fun playing a vainglorious Greek god in Kaos. Spotting a new wrinkle in the mirror, his character wonders, “What next? A dip in bone density? Gum recession? The daily stewed prune?” I ask him where that important question – “What next?” – sits in his own being. “Certainly, by having kids this late, you work out the maths and you go, ‘I hope I’m around when they graduate high school. Et cetera. Certainly.” He makes a gesture of helplessness. He says it comforts him to think of cosmic enormities such as the sun burning out. Or he likes to remind himself of a lesson from the early Jurassic Park movies – that life finds a way.
“Things are born and then they die out,” he says. “In our own fleeting minuscule little renditions of this cosmic story, the flower goes from this to this.” Goldblum cups his hand, making the shape of a blooming flower. Then he pulls his hands apart, to suggest a flower losing its petals. “You gotta accept it,” he says. “You do as well as you can with what you’re given. Get good sleep. Think good thoughts. Eat well. Exercise. But beside that, no! It’s all going. And what you do with that is a big question. What do you do with the whole thing going away?”
I tell him that seems a pretty good final thought for our interview. Goldblum, original to the last, responds by yelling, “No! No! I grieve!” Then he stands up, grabs his phone, and heads for the hotel lifts, chuckling to himself as he goes. When I ask what’s so funny, he says he has remembered, just too late, a couple of jokes he’d planned to tell me, but never got round to in time.
• Kaos will be released on Netflix on 29 August.
• This article was amended on 5 August 2024 because George Burns, not George Curtis as an earlier version said, was in the 1975 film The Sunshine Boys.
