By Garry Maddox
Jeff Goldblum holds no hard feelings about being killed in Australia.
In a famous live-to-air stuff-up,Today's Richard Wilkins announced in 2009 that the star of The Big Chill, Independence Day, Jurassic Park "and all round nice guy" was dead after falling off a cliff while filming in New Zealand.
Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day: Resurgence.
Goldblum joked about it on American television later that week, delivering a eulogy that described his acting as combining "the muscularity of Brando, the pathos of Streep and the musky sensuality of a pride of baboons."
In Australia and very much alive – looking strikingly healthy at 63 – Goldblum is tall, gangly, quick-witted and, it has to be said, likeably eccentric. He has, just a few hours earlier, discussed his premature death with Wilkins on Today.
Actor Jeff Goldblum attends an Independence Day: Resurgence screening in New York. Credit: Desiree Navarro
"I said 'think nothing of it'; it was totally understandable," he says. "People believed it for a couple of hours. My mum called. People left messages in one condition of upset or another, which was revealing and interesting. But, you know, I'm glad nobody got hurt."
There is an intensity about Goldblum that is accentuated by being what Seinfeld called a close-talker. After an exceedingly polite welcome ("I'm very honoured to be doing this"), he sits up close, across a small table in a Sydney hotel, telling a story about how obsessed he was about becoming an actor as a teenager in Pittsburgh.
"I would take a shower every morning and the shower door would steam up," he says. "I'd write 'please god, let me be an actor'. Then I'd rub it off. Every morning."
Goldblum became well-known for fast-talking roles in The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the Eighth Dimension, Into The Night, The Fly and Earth Girls Are Easy – both with former wife Geena Davis – before three of the biggest movies of the 1990s: Jurassic Park, Independence Day and the sequel The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
Jeff Goldblum in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.Credit: David James
He hasn't been in movies as big as that since then, though he worked on Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Grand Budapest Hotel and his untitled next one as part of a pack of dogs also voiced by Bill Murray, Bryan Cranston, Bob Balaban and Edward Norton. On TV, he has been in Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Glee and Portlandia.
But as Independence Day has come back, just like new instalments of Jurassic Park, Star Wars and so many other old movies, Goldblum is back in a blockbuster.
Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day.
In Independence Day: Resurgence, which has aliens threatening the earth again 20 years on, he returns as computer expert David Levinson, delivering some of the movie's cheesiest lines with snappy charm.
Roland Emmerich has directed the sequel again but in the absence of Will Smith, his character's son, Dylan Hiller (Jessie Usher), and new pilot Jake Morrison (Liam Hemsworth) take over the flyboy heroics.
Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.
Emmerich jokes that one of the reasons he wanted to revive Independence Day was to work with Goldblum again. He describes him as an actor who brings "a lot of personality" to a movie, which Emmerich wanted to use when he and Dean Devlin wrote the first instalment.
"There's nobody like Jeff Goldblum in the world," he says. "He's so unique. When we did the first one, Dean and I, we were such huge fans. We even wrote dialogue in Jeff Goldblum style ... He was the only actor we actually had in our head.
Jeff Goldblum with wife Emilie last year.
"He's very intense and he always has a way with words. He's like 'tell me, tell me'."
Hemsworth says Goldblum is truly as quirky off screen as on.
"You never know what Jeff's going to say or what he's going to do but he's such a kind guy," he says. "The easiest person to work with. He's just very collaborative, loves to hear what your thoughts are on everything. And he's just a ball of energy. He's always happy and bouncy."
Goldblum – one of four children with a father who was a doctor and mother who ran a company selling kitchen equipment – knew early that he wanted to be an actor. By late high school, he was obsessed.
"My dad said you've got to figure out a career," he says. "He was a doctor but he wisely said if you find something you love doing, that's the lighthouse or your compass."
Goldblum's compass might be a little skewed by now given Australia was just the first leg of an Independence Day publicity tour that was taking him to Dubai, Berlin, London, Mexico City, New York, Los Angeles and Japan – "pretty much up to July 4."
That's a significant date for another reason than just the movie. On Independence Day last year, Goldberg's wife, Sydney Olympics rhythmic gymnast and dancer Emilie Livingston, 33, gave birth to his first child, son Charlie.
"We were shooting the movie in the summer and they let me off for a week in the projected window," Goldblum says. "And then sure enough on the 4th of July, she had the baby. So I'm thinking about passing my whatever I have onto him and the fleetingness of life and the fragility of this planet."
Goldblum loves being a dad and, unlike many a celebrity, happily shows off photos of a genuinely handsome child on his phone.
"I'm crazy about him," he says. "My wife is very good and sweet with him. There they are going on the plane – she's Canadian – so they're travelling to Toronto while I was going here because our kitchen is being remodelled. Look at that. I mean, come on."
Becoming a father in his sixties has not made him wish he had kids earlier.
"I think everything happens right on time," he says. "I probably wasn't ready before this. I hope it's not too late but I'm enjoying it now."
So does he consider himself as off-beat as his screen characters?
"I don't know," Goldblum says, dragging it out comically like a reluctant school boy. "I just am who I am.
"I had a good teacher, Sanford Meisner. He said 'don't copy anybody. If you find your voice so to speak it will be your own.'
"So I guess I've pursued that advice. And I feel lucky to be still getting good chances to do it."
Goldblum says the first Independence Day was a unique experience because of working with Emmerich.
"To work with somebody with whom it's so fun to work and from whom I can learn – and I learned from him more on this [new movie]. Now he's even more masterful.
"I'm always trying to get better myself. I specifically made some breakthroughs working with him in this movie."
What kind of things?
"Well, I'm kind of a craft geek," Goldblum says. "I've been teaching it when I'm not working for the last two or three decades to figure out how to make myself more reliably better as I go along and do what Sandy Meisner said, which is keep improving.
"It's really just pretending. And just pretending good, in an interesting way.
"I play piano and, like that, it's kind of getting to trust yourself more. Something about Roland, maybe it's his self-trustfulness and his talent, got through to me in a way this summer. I'm anxious to do more – anxious to do more with him if I ever could – to exercise my self-trustfulness."
When people see him in the street or at an airport, Goldblum says he is sometimes surprised by the movies they recognise him for.
"I've done a lot of things," he says. "The most widely seen ones were the first Independence Day and the Jurassic Park movies and The Fly. They seem to make an impression on people, they tell me.
"The Big Chill people mention. Buckaroo Bonzai had some devoted followers. And Wes Anderson has his fans."
Whenever he's at home in Los Angeles, Goldblum plays jazz piano as part of a quintet at a club.
In Sydney, he hunted down a piano in the lobby of another hotel so he could practise. "I've played my set every day," he says.
In September, Goldblum will be back in Australia to shoot Thor: Ragnarok with Hemsworth's brother Chris. It is being shot in Queensland with Taika Waititi (Hunt for the Wilderpeople) directing.
"I'm playing the part of Grandmaster, if you know the comic book at all," Goldberg says. "I have some fun scenes and I like that whole family – the Hemsworths.
"I've met his mum and dad, Craig and Leonie were just here. Just such a wonderful family – very decent, authentic people. And talented."
He's a one-off, Jeff Goldblum. And so polite.