“I’ll be darned if he wasn’t shooting”: when Jeff Goldblum crashed a Federico Fellini set
Being charismatically and charmingly eccentric is hardly a new flourish for the persona of Jeff Goldblum, but it has played a part in his recent resurgence as one of the most outlandishly endearing figures in Hollywood.
Although his career was built on the back of range and versatility, these days there are plenty of productions happy to hire Goldblum for reasons that exist somewhere between stunt casting and novelty value, with his distinctive line delivery and innate exuberance becoming one of his major selling points.
Back in his earlier days things weren’t quite the same, with the star accumulating a rich and varied filmography that boasted Charles Bronson’s Death Wish, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, cult classic The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, and of course David Cronenberg’s The Fly.
One of the many eclectic projects he lent his name to during that period was John Landis’ blackly comedic action thriller Into the Night, which starred Goldblum as a miserable and unfulfilled aerospace engineer being cheated on by his wife, who ends up on the run after running into Michelle Pfeiffer’s jewel thief at the airport.
It was a box office bust that didn’t make much of a splash among critics or audiences, either, but one unexpected positive of the experience was that it allowed Goldblum to inadvertently witness one of cinema’s greatest-ever auteurs at work when he stumbled upon Federico Fellini in mid-production.
International publicity tours can often be a drag for actors, but on this occasion, Goldblum couldn’t have been more thrilled. “Michelle Pfeiffer and I were doing press in Rome for Into the Night,” he told The Playlist. “I’ll be darned if he wasn’t shooting Ginger and Fred.”
Fellini’s dramatic comedy revolved around local impersonators of the titular ‘Golden Age’ duo who reunite after three decades in retirement to dust off their personas for a small screen spectacular, with Goldblum making the most of his unlikely opportunity to witness a maestro at work.
“I peered in and saw just a little bit of him with Giulietta Masina and Marcello Mastroianni, for heaven sakes, shooting this thing,” he marvelled. “I saw him go over and it looked like he was saying, ‘Don’t say this, don’t say that’, and then he put on music – loud music – and they do their thing and I guess, loop it later, just like that. Pretty good.”
It’s not every day that an actor finds themselves in Europe promoting an upcoming release only to discover that an all-timer is currently in the midst of capturing one of their own and sidling up to the set of Fred and Ginger to watch a legend in full flow was an opportunity Goldblum simply couldn’t resist.
