The Hollywood actor returns to the small screen next year with his American travel series. Here, he picks out his highlights, as told to Shelley Rubenstein.
My new series, The World According to Jeff Goldblum, has taken me all over the US, with each episode centred around something people love – like sneakers or ice cream – and unravelling this wonderful world of surprising, exciting, amusing connections around the thing and the place.
I gave the producers my home movies and family photo albums from when I was a kid, and my wife and children are part of it, too. I’m kind of excited and amused by myself when I watch the finished shows, and also touched by the whole thing.
In the tattoos episode in the first series, for example, I returned to my hometown, Pittsburgh, on July 13 – which is Jeff Goldblum Day – and part of the tradition is that people were inking my face on their bodies. It was totally surreal and quite mad. Unbelievable.
When I lived there as a kid, I kept being an actor a secret – because it was nothing if not embarrassing. So, the idea of coming back to Pittsburgh – which I still find myself dreaming about every now and then – is kind of great. Then having this miraculous kind of career, where I get to do this thing, be constantly curious, travel all over the place; it’s a one-in-a-million chance, and I’m always pinching myself and thanking my lucky stars for it.
I left Pittsburgh when I was 17, after I was rejected by Carnegie Mellon University. I’d fallen in love with its campus, the students and acting: it’s where I started to howl at the moon and be obsessed with the idea of being an actor, imagining this future for myself. But I’d picked audition material that was wrong for me – Biff Loman from Death of a Salesman as he’s having this mid-life epiphany, which I certainly couldn’t have understood at that age – and they rightly turned me down. One of the teachers there advised me to go to New York and look up Sandy Meisner at the Neighbourhood Playhouse. I was lucky to get in there; he was the best choice and it was the best place.
I moved to New York right after high school in the early 1970s and had a great time living in the city. There’s footage in the show of me dancing in a nightclub in a film I did there in 1976, Between the Lines, directed by Joan Micklin Silver. I’d taken a lot of dance classes and my first job was a Broadway show. I was in the chorus and for a while I thought, “Gee, I love these dancers. I want to take three classes a day.” I still travel back and forth, doing Broadway shows at different theatres and other things. I love New York and I’ve always been romantic about it.
After four years there, I started to do movies and moved to Los Angeles, which is still my main base. The wide-open spaces of Los Angeles made for a pretty good lockdown. I was with my family – my wife, Emilie, and our two boys, Charlie, aged six and River, aged four.
We’ve still managed to get around a bit over the last couple of years, too – they were even with me in England recently. I love London and I was in the UK filming Jurassic World: Dominion. We stayed at the Langley Park hotel, near Pinewood Studios. We were so privileged because much of the world was shut down and we enjoyed a very creative time. My kids visited the set and went to the creature shop at Pinewood where they were making all the stuff for the movie.
In the first season of The World According to Jeff Goldblum, we travelled all around the USA, visiting Hawaii, Indiana and Texas, where I was in conventions amongst huge crowds of people. But the bulk of the second season started after the pandemic, so we decided we’d stay in California.
But then, around the time I was shooting Jurassic World, California and LA had a Covid-19 surge, and the producers asked if I’d be willing to spend a month in Atlanta, Georgia. I said “Ya, if you say so”, and that’s where I danced with Diego the sea-lion, Georgia Aquarium’s most famous resident – what a weird and wonderful thing that was. We also filmed at Cascade roller-skating rink, which is a black-owned business that’s been a staple of the local community for 30 years.
We also filmed in Arizona for the episode about fireworks, and the scenes of the unpolluted sky with astronaut John Herrington were emotional and awe-producing. We talk about it being a delicious part of the human experience, a mix of wonderment and delight.
I also met with astronauts last series when we went to a NASA pool in Texas. I find their particular intelligence and bravery very moving. I was in the movie The Right Stuff (1983), so I was already interested in all that. It’s poetical, romantic and historic. Talking to the astronaut about the stars and what he experienced as he was hanging onto the ship from outside doing a space walk – and, of course, seeing the planet from afar, like you do from up there, is incredible. It’s fascinating, humbling and enlightening to me.
I don’t know about going up there myself, but sure – let’s go to outer space! Maybe we could go to Mars if they figure out how to get us there quickly. You know, they’re figuring out how to bend time and space, so maybe we could travel to some place really far afield and even come back younger.
* The second season of The World According to Jeff Goldblum is now available on Disney+.
