Jeff Goldblum A Wild Ride and a Wild Time

Jeff Goldblum has had (and continues to have) an outstanding career as a film and theater actor.  He’s known and loved for his roles in so many great films like “The Big Chill”, “The Fly” ,”Jurassic Park”, “Independence Day” and so many more.   He recently stopped by SiriusXM satellite radio to talk with Ron Bennington about the Broadway play he is currently starring in– Seminar.  Excerpts from that interview appear below.

Ron Bennington:  You teach acting, right?

Jeff Goldblum: Whenever I’m not working, I have enjoyed teaching acting for the last 20 or 30 years. That’s right.

Ron Bennington: So when you look at that compared to the way your character acted as far as being specifically with people who are adults. Would you be much rougher on them than you would kids? Would you be as blunt as your character was in terms of this is how hard it is to make it?

Jeff Goldblum: I don’t find my character in this play– it’s beautifully written and smarter and funnier than I ever am. I’m sure. And for dramatic purposes, I think, in the course of these classes, he is kind of on a scared straight truth assault that is very brutal. I have rarely found myself in class doing that kind of thing. Although, I love teaching, myself, and I had great teachers, I love the classroom. And I am very passionate when I teach, and can get very worked up. Yeah, I love it. Because I was blessed early on with this commitment, devotion to, and passionate relationship with acting. I somehow got this idea when I was a kid. I’ve told the story where I would take a shower for the last couple of years of my life in Pittsburgh when I was in high school and when the door was steamy, write “Please God, let me be an actor”. And kind of erase it, so I kept a secret. It was that kind of commitment. So basically, this play, as you know, beautifully written by Theresa Rebeck and directed beautifully by Sam Gold and as long as we’re mentioning it beautifully acted by, not necessarily me, but Hettienne Park and Jerry O’Connell and Justin Long and Zoe Lister-Jones, brilliant actors.

Ron Bennington: Zoe was very surprising to me in this because I didn’t know her work.  And in no time, I mean the timing that she has. It’s just, it’s a hammer.

Jeff Goldblum: Isn’t it? She is utterly brilliant. She is masterful at…she’s funny. She’s so funny. And deep and rich and sexy and gorgeous and emotional and soulful, but spectacularly funny. She can turn a line and make a moment very, very funny. I’m learning a lot from her.

Ron Bennington: And that’s the mystery I guess of acting. I mean you have the words on the page and every actor brings something different to that part.

Jeff Goldblum: Yeah, that’s right. Well their own quality, their own nature and their own imagination. And then, like a beautifully written play like this, their own interpretation of exactly– because some of the events in it and lines in it are ambiguous in a poetical and beautiful way– they bring their own ideas to it. We could find out what the author intended. We could find out what Sam Gold and the giants who have done it before us, Alan Rickman in my case, have come up with, but you know I came up with, I started to get inflamed with certain passionate ideas about it. And I’m still, it’s evolving. I only have 2 months more. We started a couple of weeks ago and I finish May 27th. And so that’s all, what do we do it? 8 times a week? That’s only a few number of shows. By the end, I’ll keep detailing it. I kind of work on it all day long these days and after I do the show, I look at the play again and I say “Geez, what happened there?” And I love to work on it. It’s a beautiful little exercise for me.

Ron Bennington: Well I guess unlike movie acting that the audience itself helps you figure out where the funny is.

Jeff Goldblum: Yes. Yes. And everything else. Even last night, yeah, they’re participating. They’re a participant. You’re telling them, just like I tell the writers in the class in the play, I say yes, you can write it, but your job isn’t done until somebody reads it. You’re doing it so that it can be told. I tell that little story about my travels around the world and why it’s relevant to see places other than the Upper West Side and to get involved in people involved in real struggles and interesting people and the whole story of the universe as it unfolds in our world right now where things are in chaos and form is dying where by transformation can perhaps take place. That’s what I think my book that I have hidden away in my drawer is perhaps about.

But I also say what you’re doing here is irrelevant, these little stories you’ve reworked for 10 years in your own little world on the rich Upper East Side are irrelevant, but let me tell you a story particularly that’s relevant about this class. And it’s about this guy who’s got his arms chopped off. He’s a genocide survivor in Rwanda and he says to me, he tells me the woes of his story and I finally say to him “Why you telling me this story?” He says because, and almost as if it’s coming from the universe specially designed for my life and now for me to tell them, he says “I’m telling you this because you’re a writer.” (Jeff gasps) “And because that means that you must write if you’re a writer and what you write must be then told”, I say to them.   And if that’s not relevant, and that’s kind of the theme of my class with them. I go, you have to find out now and I’m going to help you find out if you’ve got at least the entry-level qualification which is a un-full hearted, wild hearted devotion. Life long devotion and compete devotion and commitment to this thing, this life in art. Life in this creative art that you’ve chosen. And if that’s not for you… if you’re not crazy wild in love with it, you’ve got to get out. That’s the entry-level qualification. And then we’ll see who else is talented beyond that. I mean the people who are in the NBA, I’m sure, you know, Michael Jordan, his mom called him when the sun was going down and said put down the ball.

Ron Bennington: That’s right, stop.

Jeff Goldblum: And stop playing. He loved doing, he had to do it everyday, all day. And every musician that we know, and I know, loves it. Just plays all the time. And then from there we see the people who are specially talented. But at least you’ve got to be– and actors too– at least, as Stanislavski said not in love with the idea of yourself in art but the art in yourself. You want to get up every day and pretend. And get into this crazy thing, in the case of actors is this game of let’s make believe. Writers want to write, etc. etc. So that’s one of the things that my character is trying to teach them. And I’m very hard on them. If they’re unenthusiastic, or not completely passionate about it, and ready to show their things. Or don’t know themselves in a certain way… I’m right. I’m good. I’m effective. And I tell them what’s going on.

Ron Bennington: I think growing up in Pittsburgh, when you get that chance not to be born in New York City or Los Angeles, it becomes an immediate thing of, I’m going to leave my world behind and join a new world. And I think so many times we forget just how important that first step is. I’m going to physically leave where I was born, to join the carnival.

Jeff Goldblum: Yes, that’s right. Somehow, the passion for what I wanted to do, and the luck and then the grace of the cards….caused me, even after I saw my two older brothers want to stay in Pittsburgh, they stayed at a college in Pittsburgh, stayed at home…. I might have done that too, but as luck would have it, I left when I was seventeen, before I turned eighteen and came to New York, all on my own. And they helped me of course, they were supportive, but that was a big, kind of…. like they say in the space program, when those things go in to outer space, the big energy is needed at the very beginning to get out of the gravitational pull. And yeah, I think you’re right. If that hadn’t happened, who knows what else would have happened. But I think what allowed it to happen is, me already going, somewhere inside myself, “I’ve got to make this happen.” I don’t know how it’s going to work. But I think that’s how luck happens. It responds to something in you that is already set in motion– which is something powerful and deep and singular.

Ron Bennington: But I think one of the greatest things that can happen to a kid is when you get that realization that, “hey I don’t belong here. This place that I grew up, it seems like there’s been a mistake. I should have been somewhere else.”

Jeff Goldblum: Yeah, that’s what happened to me. And I was luckily clear about it. Of course, I could have been a lot less fortunate. Pittsburgh has its share of– like I said, I saw plays there, and it has a share of cultural things going on. My dad was a doctor, and nobody I knew was an actor. So I kept it secret and it was kind of an embarrassing….I grew up with a blue collar kind of thing and it was embarrassing to tell anybody that I wanted to be an actor. Really that was very foreign to anything. But they had some courses there that I took. But could you imagine if we’d grown up in Rwanda? It never would have occurred— all sorts of things had to conspire to allow me to have lived this lucky life– that’s true.

Ron Bennington: And I think, and you bring it out in this play, that you don’t have to be completely likeable to be interesting, and then eventually likeable to the audience. But you don’t have to come out and show that you’re not a full human being. And I think that you’ve always been able to have that piece. That thing that you could bring to it.

Jeff Goldblum: Thank you very much. Thanks. Well I was very lucky, Sandy Meisner was a great teacher and he was the main teacher at the Neighborhood Playhouse when I came, the first big teacher that I had when I came here. And William Esper was a great teacher who is still teaching who is a wonderful man and a wonderful teacher, and I had other great teachers. But Meisner would say don’t try to be like anybody else, find something original in yourself, don’t copy anybody. I was lucky to have good teachers. Mordechai Lawner was at Carnegie Mellon when I studied there. Edith Skinner was a speech teacher was renowned. Jewel Walker was a mime teacher who I loved. I’ve had piano teachers that have changed my life, I played Jazz piano in Los Angeles. I’ve had vocal teachers who I’ve loved…hmmmm.

Ron Bennington: Some of these names that you brought up are such legends that it almost sounds ridiculous. We went back to the fate discussion and even if you didn’t have a Jeff Goldblum career, it would have been just fascinating just to have gone through that part of it.

Jeff Goldblum: You’re telling me, I know. Oh yeah, I had exposure to Lee Strasberg, and I sat in on his class. I took a course with Stella Adler who is a spectacular woman and if you’ve never seen the American Masters documentary on her that’s narrated by Meryl Streep, I recommend it. Harold Clurman I saw, and that’s another guy who started the group theater back in the thirties. Oh, these guys were amazing! And before I knew and really even deserved being in contact with them, I found myself with Sandy Meisner who is unbelievable. Changed my life, and what I teach now is something based on his technique.

Ron Bennington: Unlike a lot of things on Broadway, this is something people in their twenties, I think, would get a lot out of. Because they’re really at that age of, what am I going to do ? Am I going to pull something out of myself? You’re basically teaching creativity which is so much different than most kinds of teaching.

Jeff Goldblum: Yes, that’s right. And this brand of teacher, I think he grew up in his creative life in the seventies too. And there was Est, and free wheeling, new kind of freedom movement, explorational, actualizing, potential movement, creative training. So, you know, everything is on the table. The deepest part of the integrated human being is in the work. And it’s a no holds barred truth fest. (laughs) And it’s a wild ride and a wild time.

Ron Bennington: Well there has to be some kind of destruction inside before you can rebuild. So he’s trying to break these kids down of anything they brought in before.

Jeff Goldblum: Yeah, that’s right. Anything that holds them down. Any fear, any ego, any narcissism. Finally, these creative matters are kind of so-called spiritual too. Whereby they have to ask themselves– if they’re going to bring anything interesting to their work– ask themselves, who are we? What does it mean to be a human being? Is it true that I have to dis-identify with form, and re-identify myself, not as the person whose name I seem to have, and whose so-called reality of past and future I seem to have identified with, but something unseen, and something more powerful, and essentially shared by all of us that is the source of joy, creativity, peace and presence.

Ron Bennington: You can check this out, seminaronbroadway.com to get tickets and information. It’s called Seminar, it stars Jeff Goldblum. You’re an interesting man it’s so great to have you stop by today.

Jeff Goldblum: You’re so great, thank you.

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You can hear this interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio.  Not yet a subscriber?  Click here for a free trial subscription.  Find out more about Ron Bennington Interviews here.

See Seminar on Broadway with Jeff Goldblum now through May 27.  Go to www.seminaronbroadway.com for information and tickets.