Goldblum back to save the day
From Freak No. 1 in Death Wish to The Fly’s Seth Brundle, Jeff Goldblum has made a career out of playing eccentric characters. James Croot caught up with him as he returns to one of his most iconic roles – Independence Day’s David Levinson.
On and off screen, Jeff Goldblum is embracing the arrival of the next generation. Not only did the 63-year-old become a proud papa for the first time on Independence Day last year, he’s also helping usher in the next wave of Earth defenders in the follow-up to the 1996 blockbuster named after that most patriotic of American holidays.
Made and set 20 years after humanity successfully repelled a landmark-destroying alien invasion, Independence Day: Resurgence sees Goldblum’s MIT educated computer expert David Levinson called back into action when an even larger battle fleet turns up on our doorstep. Teaming up with former President Thomas Whitmore (Bill Pullman) and young fighter pilots like Jake Morrison (Liam Hemsworth), he must find a way to once again defeat our intergalactic enemy.
Speaking in Sydney late last month at the start of a worldwide press tour for the film which opens in New Zealand cinemas on June 23, a relaxed and playful Goldblum says he didn’t take a lot of persuading to get on board the sci-fi sequel.
‘‘They wrote me a nice part and working with Roland [Emmerich, the director of both the original and new Independence Days ]is terrific – I adore him. He’s a very sweet, generous, authentic and talented director and wonderful person.
‘‘He and Dean Devlin [Emmerich’s co-writer and producing partner] called me a few years ago and said they’d been encouraged to return to the story for some time, but they wanted to wait until they had the right script, right idea and the technology was a little bit different. They took me to dinner and told me the story and I thought it was a good idea and then the cast they got – Judd Hirsch back as my father, Bill Pullman, Brent Spiner and Sela Ward – as the first female American president, which was an exciting idea – just like real life, we hope.’’
Full of praise for his younger costars Hemsworth (‘‘a spectacular, charming, wonderful, great guy’’) and Charlotte Gainsbourg (whose presence gave Goldblum the excuse to rewatch, Nymphomaniac, Anti-Christ and Melancholia, three of the films she has made with a Goldblum favourite Lars Von Trier), the imposing looking (he’s 1.94 metres) but avuncular, jovial sexagenarian was also delighted to be able to work closely with the fresh Canadian writing duo of James A Woods and Nick Wright.
‘‘They had crafted a whole backstory for David Levinson for the intervening 20 years and I’m nothing if not conscientious, so I got them to come over to my house for several days so we could go through every page and line. I had many questions – tell me what’s happening here? How do we come up with this? That was really fun – it was easy, but also challenging and I took it very seriously.’’
Like another actor whose career was kickstarted by working on a Roland Emmerich film, Stargate’s James Spader, the once awkward looking Goldblum now exudes calm and class. Today he’s wearing stylish, eye-catching shoes, a colourful, bold-printed shirt and a jaunty hat. His enthusiasm for the project is clear, even as his focus wanders off on tangents and he plays up for the gathered international journalists, much to the chagrin of the phalanx of publicists. He’s here to do a job, but he seems determined to have fun while doing it.
When asked what Resurgence might offer the generation of moviegoers who have just about seen it all on screen, Goldblum takes the opportunity to extol the many virtues of Emmerich.
‘‘Roland is a uniquely gifted storyteller and this is a real sweet spot for him. He likes to paint with special effects and he’s got more of them than ever to help him create a spectacle and plenty of destruction. I think he had a cool idea for the original. He and Dean Devlin said ‘hey, let’s make a movie like Irwin Allen’s The Towering Inferno in the 1970s that was kind of kitsch, but if we use special-effects, maybe we can make something kind of enjoyable, with a lot of character’. This one is still in that same vein – it’s a pretty cool thing. And then there’s something even more nourishing in some of the relevant ideas in the movie – it’s a great metaphor that kids worried about the jeopardy the planet is in, when it comes to climate change, the environment, war and conflict, will be able to relate to.’’
He also confesses that despite a playing a number of scientists over the years – The Fly’s gene-splicing Seth Brundle, Jurassic Park’s chaos mathematician Ian Malcolm, The Life Aquatic’s oceanographer Alistair Hennessey – he ‘‘hardly knows anything about it’’.
‘‘My Dad was a doctor, but it’s only since I’ve been playing these things that I’ve had more of an interest in it. I recently saw Jim Watson, who along with Francis Crick discovered DNA, on a cruise I did with my family through Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore. He’s 88 now, I played him in a movie (1987’s Life Story) when I was in my 20s.’’
For Resurgence, Goldblum took the opportunity to meet Nathan Myhrvold, ‘‘a guy very involved in the pioneering work that Seti [Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence] is doing in listening and trying to make contact and send out signals into space’’.
‘‘We’ve never been visited, according to the researchers and scientific people who seem to know, and I don’t think there’s any
imminent threat from above. I think there’s many more things to worry about.
‘‘However, Seti is excited about deciphering the shape and scope of the universe, our place in it, who else is there and what we’re meant to do. It’s an exciting time – I’m told that within your lifetime, we may get to someplace close enough to get our receivers in touch to find some form of life.
‘‘Nathan also told me that it’s within reason that some of these sci-fi ideas, where you can go very far by folding space, or finding a hole, may be possible. However, the universe is also full of surprises. We know life is fleeting, we know the whole universe, this country and our lives will end and we don’t know when – so we may as well enjoy life.’’
Which is certainly what Goldblum has been doing since the arrival of son Charlie Ocean almost a year ago. And while he has plans to introduce his young charge to programmes like Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos, for the moment he’s content to give him his bottle in the morning, change his diaper ‘‘often times’’, wake him up and get in the bathtub with him every night, along with his wife (his third after actresses Patricia Gaul and Geena Davis), former Olympic gymnast Emilie Livingston.
And while Goldblum’s current visit to Australia might be brief, he’ll soon be back, joining the likes of New Zealand’s own Karl Urban and Hemsworth’s brother Chris on the Gold Coast for the third Thor movie Ragnarok. He’ll play The Grandmaster, an ‘‘enigmatic, insanely-powerful being’’ who is also, according to Marvel lore, the brother of Benicio Del Toro’s Collector. As most Kiwis will know, the movie is being directed by Taika Waititi who, given Goldblum’s selfprofessed love for Flight of the Conchords, should have a whale of time with his latest acting acquisition. Launching into impromptu impersonations of Rhys Darby’s Murray during a brief sitdown with Resurgence costar Liam Hemsworth, Goldblum listened intently as he offered advice on how to handle his big bro. ‘‘I’ve explained to Jeff that Chris can be quite a difficult person to be around and work with and hopefully Jeff takes that on board.’’
His biggest tip? ‘‘Don’t look him in the eye.’’
‘‘So he’s like a breed of dog,’’ Goldblum deadpans, while nodding sagely.
As for a third Independence Day? Goldblum is definitely open to the idea. ‘‘I think they’ve got ideas about it, I think people want to do it and I can imagine what it will look like. If nothing else happened for me, I’d be satisfied with what I’ve got, but I can’t help but hope we get to do more.’’