WICKED Star Jeff Goldblum Makes the Mundane Magical for INSTYLE Magazine

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Jeff Goldblum is taking on what may be his most challenging role yet: a villain. For the latest edition of INSTYLE’s This Guy series, Jeff Goldblum discusses fatherhood, fashion over 70, meeting Ariana Grande when she was just a tween, and more as he enters the “brink of my most exciting and fertile period.” 

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On being the wise and wacky uncle of the Wicked family: “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.”

“We wound up singing every show tune and jazz standard I could remember,” he recalls. “It was just a thrill.”

On how Ariana Grande and Jeff Goldblum first met with Ariana when she was a tweenager watching Jeff on stage: 

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?”

On working with Jon M. Chu: “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.”

On Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Bailey for the next Jurassic Park movie:  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 Jurassic Park: Rebirth, 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.

On fatherhood: “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.”

“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.”

[Photo Credit: Max Montgomery/InStyle Magazine]

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