It was a madcap idea, cooked up at an airport when Jeff Goldblum met the singer Gregory Porter by chance. But a few weeks later, on The Graham Norton Show, the Hollywood actor surprised everyone by accompanying the soul star on the piano in a crooning cover of Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa.” His musical television debut in 2017 brought the house down. One viewer, an executive at the Decca record label, was so impressed that he offered Goldblum a recording contract.
For Goldblum this was the start of a remarkable second act. He had already become a father for the first time two years earlier, at the age of 62. Now, in another unlikely twist, the ultimate Renaissance man — actor, raconteur and teenage jazz pianist who occasionally played cocktail bars — was about to become a recording artist.
There has always been something of the throwback to Goldblum. He likes a sharp crease, a shined shoe, a tilted hat. He is Hollywood royalty, with box-office hits including Jurassic Park and Independence Day and the cult classics The Big Chill and The Fly to his name.
For all his acting talent, though, it is his effervescent charm that has opened doors. He is a master at making you feel that he’s taking you into his confidence. Even on Zoom, speaking from Italy (before the SAG-AFTRA strike), his charisma is irresistible.
Goldblum, 70, speaks in tangents, not always making a lot of sense, but his magnetism is so strong you somehow don’t notice or care. What’s his personal philosophy of life? “Embodying joyfulness and spreading it around is a part of life wisdom that I’m drawn to, that I aspire to, that I keep on exposing myself to,” he tells me.
“The serious business of play was part of what Sandy Meisner [his drama coach in New York] made me feel was a worthwhile lifetime pursuit. That’s something that I’ve devoted my professional life to. It’s not inauthentic. I don’t just turn it on manipulatively, or obscenely, hopefully or inelegantly.”
An effective and much-used weapon in Goldblum’s arsenal of charm is what you might call pre-emptive self-deprecation — as if he is letting us in on the joke, with him as the punch line. In his film work he often seems to be hovering over the action — a wry, gangly, geeky, cerebral figure, and an unlikely film star. Yet that is part of what makes him so magnetic on-screen.
Jeff Goldblum speaks in tangents, not always making a lot of sense, but his magnetism is so strong you somehow don’t notice or care.
Goldblum grew up near Pittsburgh, the second youngest of four children. His father, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, was a doctor who had once nurtured dreams of acting, his mother a former radio broadcaster who set up a company that sold kitchen appliances. There was always music, Goldblum says. “My dad and mum took ballroom dancing classes. And they’d go to Broadway shows and come back with the cast albums for The Music Man and Fiddler on the Roof and Cabaret, so I became enthralled by that music too. And they studied art, and took us to the ballet, to galleries. They were both jazz fans, so they would bring home Erroll Garner records, Stan Getz, stuff like that. That was how it began.”
Goldblum is adopting what he hopes is a similar approach to his own children from his third marriage, to the Canadian Olympic gymnast Emilie Livingston, who is 30 years his junior. (His second wife was the Thelma and Louise actress Geena Davis, with whom he co-starred in The Fly.) The morning we speak he has just given a piano lesson to his two boys, and proudly moves his phone to show the keyboard he insists on taking wherever he stays.
Some of his father’s worldly wisdom is also finding its way into his parenting, albeit unwittingly. “My younger son is starting to pick at his nails, and I’m thinking, if that develops, it’s going to start looking a certain way. I was a nail-biter and I remember my dad saying, on one occasion, ‘You know, Jeffrey, when you go for a job interview and you put your hands down on the table and he sees those fingernails? It’s not going to go well.’ And, without trying to make him neurotic or wanting to introduce him this early to the concept of job interviews, I found myself recounting that to my son.”
Far from appearing exhausted by the demands of late fatherhood, Goldblum seems to be loving it. “I was reading “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe to my sons this morning,” he continues, chuckling. “Well, performing it to them. They were transfixed.”
The actor’s latest record, the EP Plays Well with Others, which features Kelly Clarkson, the jazz great and “Band of Gold” singer Freda Payne and the crack players of his Mildred Snitzer Orchestra (named after a family friend), follows two well-received albums of standards.
He’s no mean pianist, as a sold-out concert last month at the Royal Festival Hall in London proved. What that show also demonstrated was that, should the acting and music work dry up (unlikely, I know), Goldblum could probably earn a decent living as a stand-up. At one point, riffing on the differences between American and British culture, he suddenly, apropos of nothing, referenced the English actress Anya Taylor-Joy on two separate occasions. Where did she appear from, I ask him.
The answer is vintage Goldblum charm, replete with names and tantalizing details of Hollywood life that provide a glimpse of just how busy it must be inside his head. “I don’t remember saying that,” he begins. “But she’s on my mind, I tell ya. Since I’ve seen you last [we’ve never met], I’ve watched The Menu, which of course she’s in, and I met her briefly at the Los Angeles premiere of The Northman, which I enjoyed terrifically, and I saw every episode of The Queen’s Gambit. And I saw The Menu, with my pal Ralph Fiennes, not that we’re pals but I had a great time with him in The Grand Budapest Hotel. So I guess Anya Taylor-Joy was probably on my mind, but I don’t know how that came out.”
Actors who have ventured successfully into music are the exception rather than the rule. Albums by Juliette Lewis, Kiefer Sutherland, Jamie Foxx, Scarlett Johansson and the like are creditable. Those by Johnny Depp, Laurence Fox and Russell Crowe are cringe. The heart tends to sink when news emerges of another deluded thesp swapping his script for a guitar. But Goldblum is no pretender or Johnny-come-lately. He knows his Monk from his Mingus.
Jeff Goldblum’s latest album, Plays Well with Others, is out now
Dan Cairns is a music editor and features writer for The Sunday Times