The Great and Powerful Jeff Goldblum

“Emerald. Yes, yessss, of course emerald.” Jeff Goldblum’s eyes widen and brows raise as he lingers on Oz’s favorite shade of green before ticking through a list he’s jotted down himself. “Olive, sage, lime, mint, avocado, chartreuse, eucalyptus, fern,” Goldblum continues in his signature musical delivery, inflection and meter rising and falling. “Forest, hunter, jade, malachite, moss, pistachio, shamrock, verdigris, viridian, Gabrielle Union Recalls Surprising Moment Her Daughter Peed on a Red Carpet—which means water of the Nile—which is a pale green.”

“There you go,” he says, finishing his roll call of the color family with a smile. “I did it for yellow, too, ahh-ahh, because of the Yellow Brick Road.”

Covers & Features Wicked, the mega-budgeted big-screen adaptation of the Tony-winning Broadway musical in which he plays the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Admittedly, other movie stars don’t prepare to walk the red carpet by making and memorizing their own paint-chip charts. But then, none of them are Goldblum. It’s not that Goldblum doesn’t recall the color of Oz’s capital city (it’s in the name), the titular witch’s skin tone, or that of his Wizard’s proudest infrastructure achievement. Cataloging related hues simply makes a game of reconnecting with Wicked’s many nuances and layers.

Simultaneously going deep and skipping playfully along the surface—it is, in many
ways, the essence of Goldblum. It characterizes his acting and speech pattern—ahhs, umms, All About Kylie Jenner and Travis Scotts Two Kids, Stormi and Aire mmmmms punctuating his diction. Not surprisingly, Goldblum is also an accomplished jazzman; a devotee of transcendental meditation; and a man who both embraced fatherhood and unleashed a lifelong love of fashion after the age of 60.

So, there’s a multitude of reasons Goldblum looms in the culture as an icon of idiosyncrasy. The most basic may be that he is a man who contains multitudes. “I’m made of a lot of different types, as I now am coming to realize,” he tells me. “I’m sometimes out of the box and sometimes on the outer edges of the box and pushing some part of the envelope.”

That push is extending the long summer of Goldblum’s career. “I’m on the brink of my most exciting and fertile period,” he says. Full of vim and vigor, lean and largely free of wrinkles (the only real sign of his advanced years is his gray hair), ageless Goldblum is in what might be called his omnipotent era. It started in 2017’s Thor Ragnarok with Grandmaster, one of the Elders of the (Marvel) Universe. It continued in his recent turn as Zeus, ruling over humankind in Gucci, Celine, and Tom Ford tracksuits on the Netflix series Kaos. And now Goldblum is stepping into the role of Oz, the Great and Powerful, a.k.a Oz, the Great and Terrible. These aren’t heroes or even good guys, but in Goldblum’s hands, they’re having a helluva good time being all-powerful—or pretending to be. Indeed, he has one crucial thing in common with the Wizard of Oz: Both are preternatural showmen who can make the mundane seem magical.

On this late October morning, Goldblum tells me, our conversation is “just a couple of regular guys talking.” Sitting in the office of his Hollywood Hills house, Goldblum is home alone—his wife and their two sons are in Italy—dressed in designer bachelor attire: loose-fitting pale-washed jeans and a camp collar shirt from the luxury streetwear label Cherry. “It’s kind of a regular-guy bowling shirt,” he says. “I looked in my very well-curated and organized closet so I could have a creative moment and see what my hand reaches for. And this was it today. How about that? Green”—Goldblum, a southpaw, looks at his left hand—“he likes green.”

This regular guy in an olive bowling shirt grew up outside Pittsburgh and is excited to watch his beloved Steelers play later today. He’s also a day removed from stepping into a Tom Ford tuxedo for the Academy of Motion Pictures Museum gala. For Goldblum, the event doubled as a joyous, selfie-filled reunion with his Wicked family: director Jon M. Chu and co-stars Michelle Yeoh, Jonathan Bailey, Ariana Grande, and Cynthia Erivo. The invitation teased a mystery performance to close out the night, and Goldblum was surprised and overcome with emotion when Grande stood up to introduce Erivo. He watched as the actress who plays Elphaba, surrounded by a forty-piece orchestra, sang a selection of powerful, thematically related songs: “I’m Here” from The Color Purple and Prince’s “Purple Rain,” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Home” from The Wiz.

“When I think of home, I think of a place where there’s love overflowing...,” Goldblum sings the lyrics of the latter softly, eyes closed. When they open, they are watery. “She sang it better than I’ve ever heard anybody sing it, as she does everything,” he says, favorably comparing Erivo to Stephanie Mills and Diana Ross, who made the song famous. “It was just unbelievably touching and beautiful and masterful. I squirted several tears,” says Goldblum, smiling as several more creep from his eyes, “and I took out my tissue....as I’m doing now.”

This is becoming a pattern with Goldblum. The increasingly sentimental actor wept when he first saw the finished film (which opens in theaters November 22). Even watching the trailer brought him to tears. “Well, you saw that, ahh, I get easily emotional these days,” he says. “I needed many Kleenex when I saw the stage show.”

Goldblum had gone to the Broadway musical early in its run without knowing the story of the two witches, Glinda and Elphaba, and the profoundly beautiful friendship they build. The rest of the audience left the theater buzzing; Goldblum walked out wailing.

Goldblum was a theater kid from the start. “I got the [acting] bug early on,” he says, deciding he would do so professionally at age 10. His parents, artistic outliers in a blue collar industrial town, encouraged Goldblum’s aspirations, sending him to a series of theater camps. As a teen, he would write in the steam on the glass shower door, “Please God, let me be an actor.” At 17, he left for New York City and studied under the legendary Sanford Meisner. One lesson Goldblum took to heart: You’re only interesting to the extent you are interested.

Goldblum’s first film role came in the Charles Bronson vigilante flick Death Wish as Freak #1. As his profile grew, Goldblum was cast by acclaimed directors Robert Altman, Steven Spielberg, and, more recently, Wes Anderson. His fusion of the eccentric and the artistic flourished in big-budget popcorn movies. He has one for just about every generation: Please fill out this field and Ferragamo jacket and sweaters for Boomers, Jurassic Park and Independence Day I get easily emotional these days,” he says. “I needed Wicked and its conclusion, Wicked: Part II (Look of the Day), have the potential to put their stamp on Gens Z and Alpha.

In his 50-year screen career, Goldblum has become a major star while rarely playing the lead. He may be a secret ingredient for blockbusters, but only one. Goldblum seems to prefer being part of an ensemble, choosing to call his jazz band—of which he is the draw and leader—the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, after a friend of his parents. As with his loose setlists that leave room for improvisation, Goldblum moves through life and work with no set roadmap. “I don’t know that I have an agenda,” he says, “Besides... Let me see... Wait a minute... I mean, it really is: ‘I had a great time.’”

Many of Goldblum’s structured plans revolve around his children, Charlie Ocean, 9, and River Joe, 7. When his now-wife Emilie, a dancer and former Olympic rhythmic gymnast, first suggested marrying and having children, Goldblum, already twice divorced and past 60, resisted. He didn’t shut the door on the idea, however, and instead went to a therapist who helped him overcome his hesitations. He and Emilie married in 2014 and were parents within a year.

Goldblum quickly found fatherhood “revivifying,” enchanted by his infant sons’ wonder. “They’re in contact with and almost excruciatingly vulnerable to everything around them—the wind, the smell of the flowers, and every other little thing. And you're there to see them eat an oyster for the first time. And then, of course, they have no filters on their own responsiveness.... They’ve got everything, every color of the rainbow.”

As his sons have grown, Goldblum has delighted in their expanding horizons. Currently, he’s considering what books to share with the reading-obsessed boys. (He’s on a Michael Chabon kick.) “The kids are in full bloom. They’re chaotic and rambunctious and rapscallion and delightful and just amazing,” Goldblum says. “I’m surrounded by love and ecstasy and wonder of all kinds.”

Earlier this year, Goldblum returned to his hometown of West Homestead for the first time as an adult. To be sure, he left to blaze his own trail and prides himself on detachment. But Goldblum’s feelings about family have been fraught.

His older brother Rick, who’d introduced him to jazz and generally been his hero, died from kidney failure in 1971 at age 23. His eldest brother Lee, who died in 2014, was gay and had been subjected by his parents to conversion therapy. Distancing himself both physically and emotionally from his parents had been an act of self-preservation for Goldblum—one supported by his younger sister, Pamela, a modernist painter who also lives in Southern California. One of Pam’s canvases, a large moody old-master-style scene, dominates Goldblum’s diminutive office.

and its conclusion Wicked, Goldblum’s age and experience might have made him the patriarch or perhaps the wise and wacky uncle. Instead, he insists he was the one adopted by his younger costars. “I was just happy being part of their family,” he says. “I should have been, could have been, might’ve been intimidated by [Grande and Erivo], but they were so cordial and sweet.”

During downtime, the musical played out like a musical, with the Wizard and two witches breaking into song together. Trying to keep up with Grande, the multi-Grammy-winning pop star, or Erivo, a Tony winner and Oscar nominee for Best Song, Goldblum introduced them to deep cuts from his songbook. “We wound up singing every show tune and jazz standard I could remember,” he recalls. “It was just a thrill.”

When I think of home, I think of a place where there’s love overflowing
directed je ne sais quoi and ldquo;uniquely qualified” to make, “uniquely qualified” to make Wicked. “He is himself a kind of musical genius and a dancer,” he says. “The challenge of making a stage musical into a movie has been met well and sometimes not so well. Boy, he has raised the bar, I do believe.”

Chu arranged to have a piano player on set, which helped give the song sequences a sense of authenticity, and rather than lip-sync, the actors started to sing along. So even though the vocals were recorded separately, Goldblum says, “What you see in the movie is our live singing.”

Partway through filming, Grande approached Goldblum and confessed to a fangirl moment. “We met before,” Goldblum recalls her telling him, then providing proof: a two-decade-old photograph of Goldblum with a tweenaged Grande outside New York’s Booth Theatre where she’d watched him in the drama Pillowman two nights in a row. “Oh my golly,” Goldblum says after recounting the story. “Can you believe it?”

Goldblum (and perhaps only Goldblum) can say “Oh my golly” without irony. Decades of being intensely likable in left-of-center parts has made it hard for him to credibly play a villain. In the case of the Wizard, Chu encouraged Goldblum to turn this potential obstacle into an opportunity. “It’s part of the theme of the whole movie—that nobody is really evil or good,” Goldblum says. “Everybody is a complicated, elaborate tapestry of many, many things. And to reduce it to bad or good is to falsify it.”

Goldblum plays the Wizard as mostly well-intentioned but deeply misguided. Still, how Oz wields and clings to power feels pointed, if not overtly political, such as when he says, “The best way to bring folks together is to give them a good enemy.” Other times, Goldblum’s Wizard is slyly self-aware, such as when he steps out from behind Oz’s massive public-facing projection and says of the Emerald Throne Room set-up, “It’s a bit much, but people have come to expect this...”

For better or worse, it’s the same with Goldblum. He carries his je ne sais quoi into every character he portrays. You can’t help but pay attention to this man behind the curtain. Goldblum mentions another lesson from his acting training: Don’t copy anybody—make it your own in some way, find out what you can bring to it that’s special to you. “I’m trying to do that, I think,” he says. “Some of it’s just instinct. I have no particular approach, really, or goal. I’m just doing what feels right.”

Although Goldblum’s band will release a new album in April, Wicked and Wicked: Part II “fills my plate without much room for anything else.” He did manage to squeeze in a project with Scarlett Johansson, with whom he appeared in Asteroid City, although he says he can’t elaborate. He does make clear it’s not je ne sais quoi, in which Johansson teams with Goldblum’s Wicked costar, Jonathan Bailey. “I’m crazy about Scarlett...I’m crazy about Jonathan,” he says, “so they’re taking care of the dinosaur world.” Goldblum seems to have let go of the character Ian Malcolm, the mathematician who taught moviegoers about chaos theory.

“Everything is reborn,” Goldblum says, nodding slowly. “Everything falls away and gives way to something else.”

Our conversation is interrupted momentarily by the crash of what sounds like a wall coming down. “Now I can hear them banging,” Goldblum says, breaking into a smile.He’s started the demo phase ahead of rebuilding the guest house at the place where he’s lived for 40 years. “I’m very, very excited.”

“Shall I? I mean, shall I say it?” Goldblum says, delivering his threat with a laugh.“There’s no place like home....”