Jeff Goldblum outlines his childhood obsession with mime
Jeff Goldblum is anything but normal. He seems to totally embrace the oddball that he is, and fans love him for it. Funny without trying to be, Goldblum has always marched the beat of his own drum, or rather, “we march to the beat of our own avocado,” as he once said in a strange avocado-toast-making based interview.
Goldblum has enthralled and entertained interviewers for years, with Conan O’Brien once remarking, “This is the weirdest interview I’ve ever experienced,” when the actor appeared on his show. The 69-year-old actor has gained a cult following of admirers due to his unique presence, which involves an eloquent and articulate voice and particular hand gestures and mannerisms.
Goldblum made his acting debut in 1974’s Death Wish, directed by Charles Bronson. He can be seen briefly in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Big Chill. However, one of his breakthrough roles came in 1986 when he played the leading role in David Cronenberg’s The Fly, for which he won a Saturn Award for Best Actor.
Further recognition came when Goldblum played a major role in the Jurassic Park franchise in the 1990s. Since then, the actor has starred in countless films, including The Grand Budapest Hotel, Thor: Ragnarok, and most recently, Jurassic World Dominion.
Goldblum has not sacrificed his eccentric nature despite his foray into more mainstream cinema. In an interview with The Talks, Goldblum said: “My path has been from the start one of a devotedly, singular kind of expression. It makes me think of the training that I had in acting with my teacher Sanford Meisner in New York early on. He said, amongst other wise things, that we should try not to copy anybody and find our own unique voice. I think I took that to heart, that’s one of the things that I’ve tried to do, and I’m still on the threshold of finding something more from my personal gizzard.”
Goldblum also noted that he was always different from his peers in school, and showed an interest in rather unique hobbies:
“I felt alien in a way! The people with whom I originally went to school were very different from my sort of sensibility group that I found later—I don’t think any of them, for instance, pursued the creative arts. So I was kind of different, because early on, I took piano lessons, and I had some facility for drawing and painting. I liked tap dancing and then had an interest in mime.”
The actor’s love for mime is not a joke – he really did “put on white face [paint] and leotards and a horizontal striped shirt and ballet slippers and did mime demonstrations in school! […] I still find myself interested in working on that personality. I made it into a little experimental project in the last few decades.”
According to the actor, his love for mime comes from the fact that you must take on a whole new character. “It’s fun to adopt a different perspective, another kind of physical presentation of yourself, a different point of view about all sorts of things that may not be literally your own. But I like the idea of a challenge: of weaving that, marrying those character elements with something unexpectedly of my own too, you know. And mixing it up into a kind of delicious cocktail!”
