“It’s tough to choose”: Jeff Goldblum names the single greatest line of his career
When you’re Jeff Goldblum, quite possibly the coolest guy on the face of the planet, and you’ve been in something like 150 films and TV shows over a six-decade stretch, then the chances are it might be quite difficult to pick a defining moment of your career.
Goldblum has been properly stand-out iconic in, by my reckoning, at least four if not five movies over the years, those being Independence Day, The Fly, Wicked, Thor: Ragnarok and of course Jurassic Park, the last of which he will live on forever in as the bare-chested lothario mathematician with an eye for the ladies and a very sensible mistrust of dinosaur related theme parks.
And it’s that last film that, while it may not provide a singular ‘quote’ that stands as Goldblum’s favourite (although heaven knows there are plenty, not least, “Life, uh… finds a way”), does offer him a moment that he cherishes as probably his finest from a career that stretches back all the way to 1974.
That moment actually comes right at the beginning of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster, a film that for many years stood as the highest-grossing movie of all time. It’s when Goldblum’s character Ian Malcolm is in a helicopter alongside the scientific star pairing of Sam Neill and Laura Dern, plus Richard Attenborough as the elderly tycoon whose ridiculous idea the whole thing was in the first place.
Goldblum confirms this when asked for a best line from all of his films, saying: “It’s tough to choose, but off the top of my head, I think it’s my laugh in the helicopter scene in Jurassic Park”. As the quartet head through the skies on their way to the dino-infested death trap island, Goldblum quizzes them on what they do for a living, asking, “So you two… dig up dinosaurs?” prompting Neill to reply “We try to”, at which point the former launches into a pretty bizarre extended laugh that at times sounds very feline, and includes all kinds of strange noises.
Goldblum’s character is one of the few that survives the ill-thought-out experiment by the end of the movie, and by virtue of that, he was able to appear again in not just the 1997 sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, but Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom in 2018 and Jurassic World: Dominion in 2022 as well.
He was more than aware of how important Jurassic Park would be for his career, and he even has a model of a velociraptor used during the movie, signed by Spielberg, which takes pride of place in his house. That wasn’t the only souvenir Goldblum picked up from the film either, as he managed to snare his co-star Dern as well, and the two were in a relationship for a couple of years.
After spending the last few years working on the massive-scale Wicked movies, which were released in 2024 and 2025 and brought in $1.3billon at the box office, Goldblum is now turning his attention to The Liar, an adaptation of Stephen Fry’s semi-autobiographical novel about a public schoolboy who managed to fib his way into the upper echelons of British intelligence.
He has also continued his successful music career, releasing three jazz albums over the last six years and going out on world tours with the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra.
