We’re seconds into our interview, and I’m already getting the full Jeff Goldblum charm offensive. “I haven’t seen you for six years, but you look six years younger!” he beams, as if we’re old friends. “I want to know all your secrets,” he adds, conspiratorially. “Is that a guitar behind you? I’d love to hear you play that. And I hear you sing like a nightingale…”
The actor and musician is in Florence, where he’s spent the past year living with his wife Emilie and their two young sons, and is full of the joys of the Italian spring. It’s early, but he’s already had a busy morning, taking charge the boys’ piano lessons, then working on his own music.
Until a few years ago, playing piano was nothing more than a hobby: on Wednesday nights, Goldblum would hold court from the stage of LA jazz club The Rockwell, goofing around with his band, The Mildred Snitzer Orchestra (named in honour of a family friend of his parents, for no other reason than he liked the sound of it). Then, in 2017, an impromptu performance accompanying soul singer Gregory Porter on the BBC’s Graham Norton show piqued the interest of Decca Records and, as much to his surprise as anyone’s, he found himself with a chart-topping album, The Capitol Studios Sessions.
Another long-player and a couple of EPs later, he’s back with his third album, Still Blooming. Reworking classics from the likes of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Cole Porter in a style that’s as playful and loose-limbed as his acting, it’s impossible to listen to without a smile on your face. “Really? That means a lot to me – especially coming from you,” he says, slipping in a bit of extra flattery. “That’s high praise indeed. We’ve only just released it into the wild, so that’s thrilling to hear.”
As befits one of the most well-connected men in Hollywood, the record boasts an A-list line-up of guest vocalists, including Goldblum’s Wicked movie co-stars Ariana Grande, singing 30s standard I Don’t Know Why (I Just Do), and Cynthia Erivo, who transforms Vera Lynn’s wartime anthem We’ll Meet Again into a sensuous torch song. Scarlett Johansson, meanwhile, is terrific on a gloriously slinky, bossa nova version of The Best Is Yet To Come.
“I can tell you the story, if you’re interested,” he says, as if we might not be. “It all happened on the set of Wicked, where we were singing everything under the sun, from showtunes to the Great American Songbook, and then we started talking about doing this [record]. And Scarlett I’ve known for a while – we were in a couple of Wes Anderson movies together, and it was at the premiere of Asteroid City (2023) where she said, ‘let me do that song with you, in a bossa nova beat’. It was all her idea. And how about the way she sings that? I can’t stop listening to it.”
Goldblum himself handles vocal duties on a cover of Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye, performed with the same slightly distracted air – as if he always has one ear cocked to a private conversation in his head – familiar from iconic movie lines like Jurassic Park’s “life… uh, finds a way”. (In this case, “every time we say goodbye… hm, I die a little”.) It’s not intentional, he insists. “I can’t help it by this point, probably.”
Does the title, Still Blooming, reflect how he feels about his personal development? “Yeah, I’m a late bloomer,” he says. “I do feel like I’m still blooming, even at this advanced and ancient stage [he’s 72, but looks a decade younger]. I’m in my golden, or maybe platinum years, but I feel younger than springtime, and full of vitamin A. I’ve got these two kids keeping me stimulated, I’ve got a beautiful wife, and music and acting opportunities that are better than ever.” He’s living his best life? “I seem to be,” he smiles. “I hope I don’t keel over right now.”
Growing up outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the middle child of a Jewish family with roots in Belarus and Ukraine, Goldblum was introduced to jazz at a young age by his older brother Rick, whose death from kidney failure aged 23 left him devastated. “I miss him terribly every day,” he sighs. “He’d be… boy, he’d be 76. He was delightful.” Their father, a physician, liked jazz, but Rick was the connoisseur. “I remember his collection of vinyl records, and listening to him playing Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain on the little stereo in the corner of his room. Oh boy. He was a big influence on me.”
And not just musically: after Rick died, his kid brother resolved to grab life by the horns, and seize every opportunity. “That’s correct,” he says. “I mean, that’s an aspiration to which all of us can work. And knowing that it’s fleeting, and knowing that there’s loss involved, can sharpen that. I certainly have that more and more – every day, I’m asking myself how to appreciate to the utmost every moment, and get the most out of it, and leave the world a little better.”
On that score, he’s clearly winning. Because who doesn’t feel better about a world with Jeff Goldblum in it? “Well, you’re so nice to say that,” he smiles. “I suppose that’s my hope. It’s not that I don’t take the world seriously, and engage with the chiaroscuro – the light and dark that’s always been here. Because it’s a full platter, isn’t it? But a wise person once told me that if we light a candle, we’ll be better off. Having a sense of humour been a pretty good tool in the toolbox. And raising kids, too.”
Goldblum was certainly a late bloomer there, becoming a first-time father at 63, to Charlie Ocean and River Joe, now nine and eight, with his third wife, former Canadian Olympic gymnast Emilie Livingston. (He was previously married to movie co-stars Patricia Gaul and Geena Davis). “People sometimes forget that kids are hilarious,” he says, clearly smitten. “And it’s not unimportant, that little idea.”
“It’s not that I don’t take the world seriously – the light and the dark. But a wise person once told me that if we light a candle, we’ll be better off.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Wicked – in which he plays the Wonderful Wizard of Oz – was Goldblum’s first musical. “I’ve hummed a tune here or there,” he says. “And I snuck some piano into [80s films] The Fly and Earth Girls Are Easy. But this one… I saw it when it first came out on Broadway, and skipped out of the theatre with tears of joy. So to be asked to do the film was a big thrill. And then to become palsy with the great Cynthia and the great Ariana. Oh my gosh. Can you imagine?”
The film was a huge global smash, taking over $750 million at the box office. “I’ve been lucky to work with great directors, like Robert Altman and Wes Anderson, and also to be in a couple of these movies, like Jurassic Park and Independence Day, that really ring the bell in a big way with audiences. Which Wicked seems to have done. There’s a second one coming out [in November], and we’ll be doing a big international blitz, I’m sure, so you’ll be seeing too much of me all over the green Earth.”
In March, Wicked took Goldblum to the Oscars, where he went viral after being spotted scrolling through red carpet pictures of himself. “Hey, I’m kind of a humble student of social media,” he smiles. “I try to use it wisely, and not fall into the pitfalls. But one of my guilty pleasures sometimes is looking what pictures come out of me and my wife. And that’s okay. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I like to dress up, and we’d gussied ourselves up for the night, so I was probably checking to see if our showing off had borne fruit.”
At the Bafta Film Awards, meanwhile, he made a more poignant contribution, performing a piano rendition of As Time Goes By during the ceremony’s In Memoriam section. “That was such a great honour,” he says. “Some people, like David Lynch, Shelley Duval and Teri Garr, I knew personally, and others, like Dame Maggie Smith, I admired terrifically.” (A studio version, recorded with The Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, is due for release as a single soon.)
The Wizard of Oz isn’t the first powerful entity Goldblum has played in recent years (though, spoiler, that one turns out not to be quite as advertised): in the Marvel universe, he is ageless cosmic elder the Grandmaster, while last year’s Netflix series Kaos cast him as Zeus, the big daddy of all the Greek gods. What does he think directors are trying to tell him? “That’s a good question,” he ponders. “It’s one I’ve been asking myself. I’m trying not to let it go to my head.”
You do come across as a larger than life character, I tell him. “Well, thank you,” he says. “But I’m a little bug. I’m a big fan of astrophysicists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan, and it’s fun to consider our place in the geography of the universe. Because we are so incredibly tiny and fleeting.”
Some of us are tinier than others, though. In 2018, a 25ft statue of Goldblum in Ian Malcolm’s shirtless reclining pose from Jurassic Park appeared by Tower Bridge to mark the film’s 25th anniversary. This, lest we forget, is a movie about actual dinosaurs – but clearly not even a T-Rex was considered as iconic as Jeff Goldblum. “That’s so sweet, but I hope it’s taken in some irony,” he says. “I don’t mind being the butt of the joke sometimes.
“Do you remember my character in [Wes Anderson’s 2004 comedy] The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou? He was a bit of a star in the oceanographic world, and in the film there’s this huge painting of him. Afterwards, Wes said, ‘hey, you want this thing?’ So I had it framed and now it’s very prominent in our living room – this very big picture of me.”
He doesn’t always play colossi bestriding the Earth, though: he cites his role as a Holocaust survivor in Paul Schrader’s 2011 film Adam Resurrected as one of his personal favourites. Would he like to do more of that type of work? “I like to do a variety of things,” he says. “I want to do things that – as with music – allow me to keep learning and growing. But yes, some of those recent roles have some similarity, and I am hankering for some human-sized, real kind of character to play.”
Last year marked 50 years since Goldblum, who studied in New York under the legendary acting coach Sanford Meisner, made his film debut as “freak #1” in Michael Winner’s Death Wish. “It’s unbelievable,” he says. “It doesn’t seem possible. I feel fresh as a daisy. I hankered for it in the worst way, when I was a kid,” he admits. “But I couldn’t imagine it would possibly come true. I still have to pinch myself. And I’m more than grateful that I’ve been able to continue all this time. How about that?”
To the outsider, at least, he doesn’t seem like a man who has struggled with fame. On the contrary, he seems permanently delighted. “I think I’ve always maybe had a perspective of some kind,” he reflects. “On the triviality, and the superficiality of it. My own experience, for one reason or another, is that it’s just been mostly fun. And kind of sweet. When people come up to me in the street, I enjoy it. I like people, and I get a kick out of it. I’m a curious cat.”
With more than 75 movies and close to 50 TV shows under his belt, Jeff Goldblum has certainly left his footprint on the Earth. But, returning to his pet subject of astrophysics, he dismisses the notion Hollywood has conferred any kind of immortality on him. “There’s some fun to be had there,” he concedes. “But if you measure it against the cosmic calendar, and the comings and goings of species on this planet, it will be the blink of an eye before it’s all forgotten.
“Robert Altman called his production company Sandcastle, because he thought, for all the hullabaloo made about movies, it will all be swept away with the next wave of the ocean. I like that idea. It will be forgotten soon enough. But it’s for the fun of the moment that we do it.”
Still Blooming by Jeff Goldblum and the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra is out now on Decca Records
This interview was published in Waitrose Weekend on May 29, 2025
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