Interview with Jeff Goldblum
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Jeff Goldblum
Pittsburgh-born actor trained by Sanford Meisner, known for The Fly, Jurassic Park, Independence Day and Wicked. He also leads a jazz band and records albums.
Source: SAG-AFTRA Foundation on YouTube
These answers are taken from Jeff Goldblum Career Retrospective | Conversations at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation on SAG-AFTRA Foundation's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was your very first experience with acting?
I grew up in Pittsburgh and there were four of us kids. My dad was a doctor. My mom was a mom. Around 10, between fifth and sixth grades, I went to this camp, Chatham Music Day Camp it was called. It was a beautiful campus and they had things that I felt I excelled at. I really felt myself for the first time. I was a fish out of water before that in the little school that I was going to.
And then they had this drama course. They cast me after six weeks in the lead of this thing called Belle of the Balkans. I was Cohen the tourist. It was a takeoff on Gilbert and Sullivan. I remember my mom helping me rehearse and prepare. It was in the chapel theater, they called it, a big nice theater. The parents come, but it was a real theater. I remember I had funny shorts on and a camera and a hat, and I went, well, here I go. This is my cue. I had to leap on stage, and from that point on that night I had an exhilarated time.
What attracted you to begin a career as an actor?
[They] had a flirtation with the arts, and acting particularly. They carried a kind of latent and frustrated love of the arts. They would go all the time to New York and bring back Playbills and cast albums of musicals and plays.
My dad had already said, if you find something you love doing, that might be a compass, a pointer, a lighthouse for your vocational choice. That night, afterwards, they said, how'd you like that? And I said, yeah, I like that. I really had gotten the bug. Put the two ideas together.
And at that point it had transmuted into this obsession whereby I would take a shower in the morning with the steamy shower door, on which I would write, "Please God, let me be an actor." And before I left, I'd wipe it off because it was still a secret. I didn't even tell my parents that's what I want to do.
What do you enjoy most about acting?
I love the stage. I love the exercise of the eight times a week, and exploration until the last night, until closing night, when you can make it better than ever and discover something new. They call stage an actor's medium because it's all you and you do the whole thing every night. And yes, it sure is.
But movies, sometimes you can go, just roll the camera. We've never done this before. You haven't seen me do it. I have a couple of ideas. If it's that kind of show and that kind of director, you roll the camera. Let me do it a couple of times. That feels actorly to me sometimes. You can try something out that nobody's going to say, oh, no, that's way off, never mind. You can try it, and then afterwards you can say, did you like that? And it can get used. So you can find yourself being presented in your invention.
What was a great moment for you as an actor?
I was 18. I was a tenderfoot. I didn't know Shakespeare. I didn't know about the Public Theater. I came in late to the rehearsals of Two Gentlemen of Verona, didn't even audition. They called the Neighborhood Playhouse and said, do you have somebody tall? I think we need a guard for these couple of scenes.
We previewed it in the park, and it was kind of working, not working. Raul [Julia] and Clifton Davis were learning their lines in rehearsal. And then Joe Papp said, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're opening tomorrow night. The opening song, that's the end song. Let's do this. Cut that. And I'll be darned if opening night, and not until then, we did our stuff and the audience cheered like it was the Super Bowl. They went wild. It somehow caught. It rang the bell, and that was it.
How did your acting career unfold?
Death Wish was the first movie I ever auditioned for and I got it. We went in three at a time and pretended to do bad things to women who weren't there. Then I got Two Gentlemen of Verona, and then I went, well, my study is now kind of over. Now I guess I better do this intentionally. I fluked my way into a couple of things here.
So I got the trade papers, it was then Backstage or something, a cattle call for El Grande de Coca-Cola. I showed up and I got it. It's a funny show and I played piano a little bit in it, and people were saying, oh, you're good, you have to be with us. I got an agent that way.
That winter there was a big snowstorm, the story goes, and Robert Altman couldn't get to his Broadway show, so he went across the street and saw me and liked me. A week later his casting person called and said Robert Altman wants you to be in this movie, California Split. He said, if I like you and you like me, I'm doing this thing this summer called Nashville and I have an idea for something in there for you. And he did and I did and we did it that summer. I was lucky.
What advice do you have for new actors?
Sandy Meisner said you have to be able to make it your own. You can take any idea and make it your own. That's what we're after. So take somebody's good ideas, bad ideas, watch the thing. Students often fall too easily into the arrogance of, oh, what we're doing here is better than so-and-so, and so often that's not true, in my humble opinion. So I would say, please consider that you can watch these professional actors and at least get into the ballpark of what this is about.
One thing that I tell myself, and sometimes I tell other people: you're right on schedule. You're right on schedule, which in a way you are. No matter what the calendar says, or your own juxtaposition of hopes and accomplishments, in some more profound way, you are right on schedule.
Think about a demanding director, professor or cast mate. What made him or her difficult? How did you successfully interact with this person?
Michael Winner, his legacy is that he was a screamer. I'd never done a movie. I just studied with Sandy Meisner. I wanted to come off like, they shouldn't know, it's a little misguidedly Method-y. They should think they got a real crazy tough guy. So after several days, I didn't shower and stuff like that. We were in a tight apartment, and the AD said, Jeff, can I talk to you for a second? You smell. You got to shower. Oh, I'm so sorry.
The first shot, the three of us are skulking up the stairs to this Upper East Side apartment and we're doing a camera rehearsal. I didn't know how this thing works. He goes, okay, come on, do it, guys, let me see what you're going to do. And he yells at the top of his voice, "Goldblum, start acting now!" Which kind of shamed me. I was burning with shame, and sort of, should I be mad? But then I did it. It came out okay. And as it turns out, as a direction, not that bad.
Describe your acting style.
Sandy Meisner, that's the technology, and it worked on me. It's a technology for pretending under imaginary circumstances and telling an imaginary story, but it's a matter of opening up. I've devoted my life to trying to aspire to the impossible optimum of openness and connection. You're better if you leave yourself alone and get interested in what you're actually doing with and to the other person.
I tape all the other people's lines in my scenes, leaving pauses for my own part. I also get people, surrogates, sparring partners, and I have them over all the time. There's no substitute for that, back and forth and back and forth. By the time I got to the set, I had my part not only memorized but I had come up with things, because sometimes they encourage you to improvise a little bit. I like to get together with the director and say, here's what I'm doing. I brought the tape recorder. Can I do my whole part for you? Tell me if I'm in the wrong direction.
Tell me about a time where you had difficulty with a character. What was the role and why was it challenging?
I think The Fly was a landmark and breakthrough for me creatively. I felt as never before so passionate and invested in the thing. It was meaty and challenging. I knew that it potentially had a lot, so challenging in the sense that I could fall short of what I know this potentially could be.
And all the physical challenges. I start to have that fly, which is in [Cronenberg's] interpretation a stronger, superhuman kind of resource. So I was lifting weights just before we shot, and I'd pump myself up for a couple of those scenes. Finally it was five hours in the chair, and in the middle of the night you'd go to the stage and it was freezing cold in Canada.
And then emotionally it was demanding. I had to be in a fury for some things, and sexuality and heartbreak, and finally tragic romance, going out of my mind in order to be with my love that had finally come my way at this point in my life, even though I was now getting sick at the same time.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your resume.
I'd already set my sights on acting as a career, but piano in a parallel way was a love of mine. I learned jazz and I wanted to play jazz, and it has now developed into a side passion. I thought it was another secret of mine. I locked myself in a room in the house and got the Yellow Pages and looked up cocktail lounges and started with the A's. Hello, I understand that you're looking for a pianist there. Nobody told me, I got this idea myself. Most of them said, no, we don't have a piano here, never mind. Okay, next.
And [one] said, well, I'm not looking for anybody. We have a piano here. How old are you? Okay, well, come down and show me what you can do. I got a couple of gigs that way. Cocktail lounge jazz pianist at 15. I had a desire, a life force in me that wanted to connect.
In which area would you like to improve as an actor?
I was prepared, but I didn't know preparation. How to prepare is something I'm still learning. I was 40 years less knowledgeable about it 40 years ago, so not as prepared as I know how to be now. I'm still a humble student.
I'm a craft geek. I wanted to know it inside and out as much as I could. So I taught it, and became very full of conviction and passionate about my own particular interpretation of what [Meisner] was after.
Sandy Meisner said it takes 20 years to even call yourself an actor, but you can keep getting better until your last breath. And so maybe that's in my mind, and I feel like it's coming to fruition.
Jeff Goldblum's Full Biography
Jeffrey Lynn Goldblum was born October 22, 1952 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of four children of Shirley (Temeles), a radio broadcaster who also ran an appliances firm, and Harold L. Goldblum, a doctor. His father was of Russian Jewish descent and his mother was of Austrian Jewish ancestry.
Goldblum began his career on the New York stage after moving to the city at age seventeen. Possessing his own unique style of delivery, Goldblum made an impression on moviegoers with little more than a single line in Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977), when he fretted about having forgotten his mantra. Goldblum went on to appear in the remake Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and co-starred with Ben Vereen in the detective series Tenspeed and Brown Shoe (1980) before a high-profile turn in the classic ensemble film The Big Chill (1983).
The quirky actor turned up in the suitably quirky film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), which became a 1980s cult classic, starred in the modern-day film noir Into the Night (1985), then went on to a breakthrough role in the David Cronenberg remake The Fly (1986), which also featured actress Geena Davis, Goldblum's wife from 1987-1991 and co-star in two additional films: Transylvania 6-5000 (1985) and Julien Temple's Earth Girls Are Easy (1988).
Goldblum was the rather unlikely star of some of the biggest blockbusters of the 1990s: Steven Spielberg's dinosaur adventure Jurassic Park (1993) and its sequel The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), as well as the alien invasion film Independence Day (1996). These films saw Goldblum playing the type of intellectual characters he has become associated with. More recently, roles have included critically acclaimed turns in Igby Goes Down (2002) and Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). In 2009, he returned to television to star in his second crime series Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2001).