Jeff Gold­blum: ​‘Find­ing out our rela­tion­ship to the uni­verse – that would be something’

Jeff Gold­blum is a char­ac­ter come­di­an and a cere­bral sex sym­bol. At 6’4” and with match­stick limbs, he is like an ele­gant Basil Fawl­ty, or a charis­mat­ic prey­ing man­tis. He is also an infa­mous flirt. At a press jun­ket for Juras­sic Park, he lit­er­al­ly charmed the shoes off broad­sheet jour­nal­ist, Sabine Durrant.

Now, aged 63, his pow­ers remain. He has a way of wrap­ping his mind around ideas, express­ing nuances of opin­ion before wind­ing down with a purring chuck­le. It makes you hap­pi­ly help­less when he offers the stroke of a respect­ful com­pli­ment. It’s inevitable that the con­ver­sa­tion turns towards inti­mate mat­ters, such as hav­ing close rela­tion­ships and how act­ing can dis­place the urge to play away. At least to begin with, we have con­nect­ed to dis­cuss Roland Emmerich’s Inde­pen­dence Day: Resur­gence – the first sequel the direc­tor has ever put his name to.

Gold­blum repris­es the role that he first played 20 years ago in Inde­pen­dence Day, that of ex-sci­en­tist, David Levin­son. This time around, when the aliens approach, there is no Will Smith to offer a gung-ho help­ing hand, but instead a new sup­port cast of patri­ot­ic upstarts that includes Mai­ka Mon­roe, Liam Hemsworth and Char­lotte Gains­bourg. Ris­ing from the wreck­age and brush­ing them­selves down, the denizens of Earth have wise­ly cho­sen to sink some time and resource into mak­ing sure they’re pre­pared were this to ever hap­pen again. They have been tak­ing advan­tage of the alien tech­nol­o­gy that they laid to waste in ​’96. Yet, the aliens, too, have been prep­ping for anoth­er skir­mish – can the plan­et sur­vive the same shit twice?

LWLies: Inde­pen­dence Day: Resur­gence sees you repris­ing your role from the orig­i­nal film, where you were the only one who knew that were are not alone in the uni­verse. Is that some­thing you believe?

Gold­blum: You know I’m an actor? I’m not the best per­son to ask. I’m inter­est­ed in the ques­tion, and I look to the sci­en­tists and the Neil deGrasse Tysons and Carl Sagans of the world. I fol­lowed them a lit­tle bit through the years. Recent­ly, I googled the head of SETI [Search for Extra-Ter­res­tri­al Intel­li­gence], which is the organ­i­sa­tion that lis­tens for… them. They say we’ve nev­er been con­tact­ed but – the con­ven­tion­al wis­dom is – because of the size of the uni­verse there’s a like­li­hood that there are oth­er kinds of life out there. Recent­ly, I read some­thing by this guy who heads up SETI who said that because of our extend­ed reach and lis­ten­ing recep­tion, he pre­dicts that in the next 20 years, we might be in con­tact with some­body. What do you think of that?

Would you like that?

It’s not some­thing that I’m obsessed with, or wake up every day think­ing, ​‘Gee, here’s what I’m miss­ing from my day. I wish I could talk to some­body who lives on anoth­er plan­et or in anoth­er galaxy.’ But I’m sure that would be a land­mark event in the human species and would be absolute­ly fas­ci­nat­ing and would inspire a mil­lion ques­tions and hope­ful­ly a growth spurt of some kind. All these ques­tions of: what is the uni­verse? Who are we? Where are we? What’s our rela­tion­ship to the uni­verse? That would be real­ly some­thing. Of course, here on this plan­et, it would be nice to make con­tact with all kinds of peo­ple, and be in healthy and inti­mate but ful­ly effec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion and com­mu­nion with all oth­er human species, not to men­tion all the oth­er forms of life on our plan­et. We’ve got a long way to go before we con­tact all of them, right?

So you don’t wake up wish­ing for alien con­tact, but what do you wake up wish­ing for?

Well, I just had my first child – me and my wife, Emi­lie. Gen­er­ous­ly, this love­ly pro­duc­tion gave me a week in the sched­ule. I made my way from Albu­querque, where we were shoot­ing, back to LA, and it hap­pened on the 4^th of July that Char­lie Ocean Gold­blum was born. How about that? So, in the morn­ing, I love to wake up and see him and maybe help feed him and change his dia­per and spend the day with him and give him a bath lat­er that night. All three of us get in a big bath­tub – that couldn’t be more fun, we sing to him and hear him sing and watch him play. When I’m not work­ing I play in a jazz group called the Mil­dred Snitzer Orches­tra. If you’re ever in Los Ange­les, please come to Rock­well, where we cur­rent­ly have a res­i­den­cy. We play every Wednes­day night. So I look for­ward to – not only prac­tis­ing and play­ing my piano and singing every day at home, but then get­ting togeth­er once a week and play­ing with those guys.

Does this mean that act­ing is down the list of priorities?

No, I love act­ing. I’m work­ing on some­thing now that I’m not sup­posed to talk about. I did anoth­er lit­tle thing with Wes Ander­son that I loved work­ing on. I like work­ing on act­ing every day. I did a cou­ple of shows. I don’t know if they came out in the UK. I did some­thing on Port­landia. I enjoyed that and I just did an episode of The Unbreak­able Kim­my Schmidt, the Tina Fey show, that I liked doing. I have a very good time act­ing these days.

How do you stay bal­anced with so much on the go?

I don’t know. Let me see. Well, I’m just lucky that I’ve got sev­er­al areas of pas­sion­ate inter­est and involve­ment. I don’t know. Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha. I’m just lucky, but bal­ance is one of the things that I aspire to. Some­times, I’m not so bal­anced but I try every­day to do some­thing that exer­cis­es my human kind of balance.

Any tips?

I’d have to get to know you first of all. I’m not so much an advi­sor and more a hum­ble stu­dent than any­thing. I’d have to know you per­son­al­ly and know your bal­ance chal­lenges before I could weigh in. I might have an idea or two. Let me see, let me see. Hmmm. Wear a scarf. Watch out for your neck get­ting chilled and… what else? Por­tion control.

That’s a real­ly good one. Thank you.

I have to do it myself because if I open a bag of pop­corn, for instance, jeez, it’s hard not to eat that whole damn bag. I have to just exer­cise a lit­tle dis­ci­pline and go, ​‘Well, just a lit­tle bit of this now will be fine and dandy.’

You said that you’d have to know me to give me tips. How well can we know anyone?

When you’ve got some­one you’re inter­est­ed in or all the peo­ple that you have dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ships with – whether you work with them or are mar­ried to them – it’s a dai­ly chal­lenge and oppor­tu­ni­ty and adven­ture to con­tact them. How well? I’m sure there are always infi­nite ways you could go. There’s prob­a­bly no fin­ish line or peak on that moun­tain, but you can always attempt to look in their eyes more deeply, open your­self up more ful­ly and get more specif­i­cal­ly inter­est­ed in them and take a journey.

Are there dan­gers in that?

Are there dan­gers in that? Well, I think the greater dan­ger is to not go on the jour­ney, to avoid that. There­in lies the real dan­ger. It can be messy. It can be upset­ting. It can be fright­en­ing, but I think your con­nec­tion with oth­er peo­ple is cer­tain­ly one of the ways in which you can max­imise this deli­cious and mys­te­ri­ous oppor­tu­ni­ty of being here. Don’t you agree?

I’m think­ing about how there are more inter­est­ing peo­ple than we will ever be able to know, and it’s a pos­si­bil­i­ty that in get­ting to know one per­son well, you might endan­ger what you have with a per­son you already know.

Ohh, wait a minute, I think you’re talk­ing about… I think I heard a lot of that. I think I get the gist of it, ha ha ha ha. If you have this arrange­ment with one per­son, rela­tion­ship-wise, you mean get­ting to know anoth­er per­son too well could vio­late that, betray that oth­er relationship?

Cor­rect.

Oh, that’s what you’re talk­ing about. Well, now, this is a more meat and pota­toes, y’know, issue. Sure. But that’s case-by-case and it’s a very per­son­al thing, isn’t it? Why, are you involved in some dilem­ma like this yourself?

No, I just like thought experiments.

Thought exper­i­ments! Yes, yes. Yes, yes. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, so you have to keep your wits about you, prob­a­bly, and be dis­crim­i­nat­ing and dis­creet while you’re going on this head­long adven­ture. You can be child­like with­out being child­ish. You can be free­wheel­ing and free and in full pos­ses­sion of your play with­out los­ing your sense of adult dis­ci­pline. What do you think of that?

Yes. Also, imag­i­na­tion. You can imag­ine any­thing as long as you don’t do it.

Well, act­ing is this cho­sen field of mine. It has some­thing to do with imag­i­na­tion and it can sat­is­fy you, yes. You can live things out in your imag­i­na­tion and have some kind of sat­is­fac­tion with­out actu­al­ly doing them. I think that’s true. In my expe­ri­ence, that’s right. That’s right.

Would you rec­om­mend act­ing to your son as a job?

I would share my pas­sion for it and the fun that I’ve had and the chal­lenges of it and the pit­falls of it, but I would be much more inter­est­ed in see­ing and learn­ing what he’s inter­est­ed in nat­u­ral­ly. That would be fas­ci­nat­ing to me and it cer­tain­ly wouldn’t have to be… No, I wouldn’t rec­om­mend act­ing over any­thing else. I would just take my cue from him.

So, you like to listen?

I do like to lis­ten. Yes, I do. I think I can say. ​‘Yes’.

Inde­pen­dence Day: Resur­gence opens 23 June.