Goldblum's charm offensive hard to crack

By LESLIE FELPERIN

Jeff Goldblum cannot walk by a piano without playing it. When I enter the room at the swanky Hyde Park Hotel for our interview, he's running his fingers lovingly up and down the baby grand's keyboard in what sounds at one point like a jazz version of Put on a Happy Face, doing little quick twiddles on its high notes, massaging the melody in the mid-range with gentle force.

After the impromptu concert is finished and our interview begins properly, it strikes me that, likewise, he can barely meet a woman without flirting with her.

He looks me in the eyes as he tickles the ivories, checking to see whether I'm enjoying it, so I duly make happy gurgles and clap on cue. He touches my arm to guide me to the cushy chairs, lays a hand on my leg briefly when he asks if I want to have lunch with him and then cajoles me gently to eat more, part-Jewish mother, part food-seducer, and asks me questions about myself. When I leave he kisses me on both cheeks and gives me a big hug.

Naturally, it's all flattering, but I soon realise the guy would flirt with a vacuum tube. He does this shtick with the PR women ushering him around to talk about his latest film Igby Goes Down, the waitress who brings in his grilled fish and brown rice, and with every girl at the party where I run into him later that night. Indeed, the girls are clustered around him like flies on a 1.9m sugar stick.

When I go up to say hello, after 10 hours and a score of the other interviews he must have done that day, he not only remembers who I am (many an actor would affect not to), but also that I was going for a big lunch that afternoon and wants to know how it went and what I ate. And I get another hug for good measure on departure.

It's that focus, that uncondescending attention to, and memory for, detail that keeps the flirting thing from seeming, well, a tad lecherous. I can see now why he's rumoured to be such a hit with the ladies.

After all, despite being a kind of gawky, still faintly adolescent-looking 51-year-old with elfin ears and lascivious mouth, he was married to Geena Davis and dated Laura Dern for years. If you want to see him in action, check out Jurassic Park (1994) where he dribbles water on Dern's hand while he explains chaos theory, leering his way through the chat-up science patter.

When he's not acting, Goldblum teaches a regular class in LA on improvisation, based on the theories of his own teacher, Sanford Meisner. If anything, our flirtation feels like some kind of improv game, a playful bit of jousting that neither of us imagines is serious for an instant.

As with the piano, Goldblum believes in constant practice with acting. He mentions how Meisner used to quote Vladimir Horowitz, saying that, "If you miss one day's practice you would know it, if you missed two the critics would know it, and if you missed three, the audience would know it". Clearly, he likes to keep all his skills - acting, piano-playing, chatting people up - razor-sharp, too.

Politely mindful of who's paying for his trip to London, he dutifully steers the conversation on to Igby Goes Down. In it, Goldblum plays Master of the Universe D. H. Banes, godfather to Kieran Culkin's Holden Caulfield-esque Igby.

Banes indulges his feckless godson's misdemeanours with a jackal's smile, keeping his gin-pickled wife in Washington DC and a drug-addled mistress in a swanky New York loft. The film was directed by Goldblum's former student Burr Steers, and he smilingly concedes that maybe it was a bit of ex-student revenge to cast Goldblum as something of a villain.

Like The Royal Tenenbaums, Igby is a movie with too many interesting characters for the space of its plot. But Goldblum's is especially vivid - one of the few bad guys he has played. He's usually the wry, intellectual hero in such films as The Fly, Independence Day, and the two Jurassic Park movies.

He is cast a little against type in Igby, I suggest, as this patrician, Wasp-y figure. "I haven't done so much of that type, yeah," he drawls. "I'm kind of a loosy-goosy type sometimes. Burr kept telling me to stay contained and stiffish and keep your voice in a macho register." He mimics the deep, stiff voice.

Are villains more fun to play? "I've played a few," he recalls. "In Silverado I played a surprisingly bad guy. A little bit in Deep Cover, and then in Mr Frost I played the Devil. My first movie was Death Wish, which Michael Winner directed. I was 18 or something and I remember going with a whole bunch of guys into a room three-by-three. Nobody else was there playing the victim, but we had to mime raping and killing to get the part."

It was The Big Chill which made him into a featured player, and in the latter half of his career he's nimbly moved between the blockbusters and more indie-tempered fare.

Is it difficult, I ask, to shift gears between the two? "Not necessarily," he says. "If you're acting every day, it doesn't feel much like a shift to go somewhere and do acting anywhere, even if the crew is a lot bigger and there's fancier stuff on the craft service table.

"Steven Spielberg is the same as the others, a very smart, very collaborative guy. Likewise Burr Steers. I liked making Independence Day. There's always something I'm trying to do in the parts, and those parts are real. It may seem stupid to other people, but it's always challenging to me."

I probe on about his dating habits, asking if it's been strange seeing his love life splashed over the tabloids. "I've never noticed that I was in them much since I never buy them," he says coolly.

Is it easier to date other actors, given they're used to public exposure? "They understand that, but it's not necessary," he muses. "I've dated actors and non-actors alike. Relationships are [he pauses] interesting. And a special person that you can connect deeply with, yeah [pauses] ... Are you married?"

No, but I have a boyfriend, I explain, and no, I don't have any kids, I reply to the next question.

Does he regret not having any children himself? "No. I don't," he says without rancour or defensiveness.

Has playing fatherly figures and being a teacher been like being a parent? "Yeah, hopefully you're nurturing and encouraging, putting your needs aside and trying to get involved in who they really are. What you can do to impact their growth - that's a delicious thing to do.

"I'm often really moved in those classes when somebody works hard and starts to get it. Gee, that's sweet. Yeah, I bet kids would be sweet, too."

So why didn't he ever have any? "I wonder," he says. "I don't know. I've never seriously tried or had that in mind. I think I got the idea that it was a very challenging thing to do that I wouldn't want to fall short of. You have to be in love with the idea to do it and I guess I never was."

If he hadn't been an actor, he would have probably been a musician, he conjectures. He plays every week in LA if he's in town with his jazz ensemble, the daftly named Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, which he started with fellow actor and part-time trumpeter Peter Weller (it's named after a friend of Goldblum's family).

He argues the two skills, acting and music, complement each other and naturally he sees a parallel between improvising musically and playing off a fellow thespian in a scene, jamming with a good director.

Soon he gets to work with a couple of virtuosos in his next project, The Aquatic Life of Steve Zissou, in which he'll play opposite Bill Murray as rival oceanographers, directed by The Royal Tenenbaums' Wes Anderson.

As the interview winds down, we gossip about Cannes this year in a desultory fashion. Then it really is time to go, and Goldblum makes a gentlemanly show of being sorry to see me leave. He wants to check we've covered "all the Jeff bases".

In fact, for all his charm and ease there's a sort of veneer there which I don't think I've begun to penetrate, but he's a delightful breakfast companion.

On Screen

Who: Jeff Goldblum

What: Igby Goes Down

Where: Rialto Cinemas

- INDEPENDENT