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A passion for his profession

Actor Jeff Goldblum, for 30 years a master of keeping those roles coming, visits USF to answer students' questions.

By JOHN FLEMING
Published July 19, 2005

	[Times photo: Joseph Garnett Jr.]
	Actor Jeff Goldblum speaks with Broad Theatre Project students Monday morning on the stage of USF's Theatre 2. Students from the Broadway Theatre Project perform at 3 and 8 p.m. July 30 in Ferguson Hall of Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. $35. 813 229-7827; www.tbpac.org

TAMPA - Jeff Goldblum has some advice for aspiring actors. "Either you're wildly, passionately in love with it, or you should get out. If you're in it for the money, or the fame, don't do it."

Goldblum, 52, was at the University of South Florida Monday to speak to the 175 students in the Broadway Theatre Project, answering their questions about his long career in movies, TV and theater. He started out by recalling his own experience at a summer theater camp while growing up in Pittsburgh.

"Every morning when I took a shower, I would write on the mirror, "Please God let me be an actor,' " he said. "It has been an odyssey and an adventure of the heart."

Goldblum's career advice is worth heeding because he is that rarity, a consistently employed actor. From his first movie role in 1974, in Death Wish ("I was one of the three guys who killed Charles Bronson's wife and raped his daughter"), to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou in 2004, he has had at least one movie credit every year for 30 years.

"Luckily, the parts went from smaller to bigger to bigger," he said. "I felt like I learned as I was going along. Sometimes when I look back, I realize I didn't know what I was doing in many ways."

These days, Goldblum is enjoying the rush of being in a Broadway hit, The Pillowman. He was in Tampa on the day Broadway theaters are dark. He had been invited to speak to students, who range in age from 17 to 24, and watch some of their scene work by his New York vocal coach, Joan Lader, a teacher in Ann Reinking's program, now in its 15th season in Tampa.

Goldblum has been in some of the biggest screen blockbusters of all time, including Independence Day and Jurassic Park, and he has also appeared in plenty of movies that went straight to cable TV or video stores, such as Beyond Suspicion, in which he plays a life insurance salesman who becomes the doppleganger of an ex-con; an all-improvised movie about the fashion business, Perfume; and Trigger Happy, an allegorical gangster drama.

Are some of these obscure movies unjustly neglected?

"Well, I think whatever happens is just, because the universe is as it is," replied Goldblum, who practices meditation and yoga and sported a colorful pair of skateboarding sneakers Monday. "But I do enjoy some elements of some of those movies that are less seen. Ever see The Tall Guy? It was Emma Thompson's first movie. I think that's an enjoyable little nugget."

Goldblum made a movie called Mini's First Time, scheduled to be released this year, but his biggest coup is to be in The Pillowman, a psychological drama by Martin McDonagh in which he plays a cop in a totalitarian state interrogating a suspected child killer.

From a strictly business standpoint, taking an extended leave from Hollywood, where Goldblum lives, to do a play in New York didn't seem like a great idea to his manager. But a phone conversation with the play's director, John Crowley, persuaded the actor.

"I've had good parts and all that, but you know, my system is often hungry for fulfilling my real creative needs," Goldblum said. "When I was talking with John, I was actually weeping, I wanted to do it so much."

The Pillowman is scheduled to close a limited run in September, but producers have asked Goldblum and the rest of the cast to continue for another six weeks. He's not sure yet if he will.

Goldblum was in another stage show last summer, playing Harold Hill in a production of The Music Man in Pittsburgh. His fiancee, dancer Catherine Wreford, played Marian the Librarian. The entire experience was filmed for a cinema verite-style docudrama, chronicling the actor's return to his hometown. He sees the movie, which is still a work in progress, as a mix of fiction and real events that aspires to the "mind-bending surrealism" of directors John Cassavetes and Robert Altman.

Goldblum is fondly regarded by baby boomers for his role as a People magazine writer in The Big Chill. He has a knack for bringing a touch of flair to geeky characters like journalists or scientists (Independence Day), and that is not accidental.

"I had kind of a personal creative and professional agenda whereby a part that may have been geeky was sort of transformed into a cool and sexy, although unique, science type," he said.

[Last modified July 18, 2005, 19:44:22]