The only 1960s icon capable of leaving Jeff Goldblum lost for words: “My golly, I’m very starstruck”
One thing that has been noticeable as Paul McCartney does the rounds to promote his latest album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, at the admirable age of 84, is that people, when meeting him, are quite obviously now thinking ‘Holy shit… that’s one of The Beatles’, and you can add Jeff Goldblum to that list.
Goldblum is, of course, an A-lister himself of quite some standing, but The Beatles, and John Lennon and McCartney, no less, are on a completely different level. Now that they’re much older, and only two of the Fab Four are still here, they have taken on an almost mythical status, and rightly so, because without the band having existed, the world would be a strange place indeed.
You can always watch the ‘sort of quite good’ film Yesterday if you want to imagine what that world might be like, but luckily McCartney met Lennon at a garden fête in Liverpool in 1957, introduced him to George Harrison, and after a quick stop at Pete Best, they reached out to Ringo Starr, who was the best young drummer in the city, and changed history.
Goldblum is also a musician of note (or rather lots of notes) and coincidentally is currently out and about getting behind his own new album of jazz, Night Bloom with his Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, but it was actually at a stage performance in New York that he got to meet his Liverpudlian hero for the first time.
Both Goldblum and McCartney had individually gone to see George Clooney in the Broadway adaptation of his 2005 movie, Good Night and Good Luck, and it gave the actor an opportunity not just to meet Clooney but also McCartney backstage.
Goldblum told Seth Meyers, “I was very excited. After the play, I was looking and [McCartney and I] both got a chance to go backstage and meet George and the cast. I saw him [McCartney] in the flesh for the first time ever, and there he was.”
Goldblum recalled how he thought to himself, “’My golly, I’m very starstruck,’ because he means a lot to me. He was very nice…he said, ‘Jeff, Jeff Goldblum. I love Jeff Goldblum. Come here, Jeff, let’s take a picture’, and all that stuff. It made my life and my year.”
Aside from being in the midst of a European tour, Goldblum has seen his fame go through a massive renaissance thanks to his starring role in both parts of the Wicked movies with Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo. Goldblum plays the Wizard of Oz in the lavish adaptations, which combined earned over $1.2billion at the box office, with the first instalment also picking up ten Oscar nominations.
This year also marks the 40th anniversary of the movie that gave the actor his breakthrough, 1986’s sci-fi body horror The Fly from David Cronenberg. A host of stars had turned down the lead role of the unlucky scientist Seth Brundle, who gets spliced together with a buzzy insect, including Pierce Brosnan and John Malkovich, but it was the B-movie actor Goldblum who got the nod in the end, primarily because he was more than willing to sit in the make-up chair and have prosthetics applied for hours on end without complaining.
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