Jeff Goldblum Delights French Festival Audiences, Teases New Project

There are film festival talks, and then there are Jeff Goldblum film festival talks. Any festival worth its salts can usually lure some big-name talent into town for a candid speech/Q&A sesh, but a The Hollywood Reporter item from Goldblum’s appearance at France’s Deauville Film Festival last night states that he went above and beyond the usual anecdotal reminiscing and dropping of the occasional quotable soundbite. The evening was supposed to be a tribute to the great, eccentric actor, but true to form, he promptly turned it into the Jeff Goldblum Variety Hour.

As he walked the collected audience through a 15-minute tour of his long, illustrious career complete with song and dance — from his humble beginning as a teenage Marcel Marceau devotee through to his present gig on Thor: Ragnarok — Goldblum decided the evening needed an element of pizzazz. As only he could, the actor then struck up a tune and led the crowd in selections from the Jurassic Park soundtrack. Among the evening’s other diversions: a Kevin Bacon-style “6 Degrees of Goldblum” game in which the actor traced a line from Jane Fonda back to himself in four moves, and a full-on mime routine.

Better still, he teased an intriguing upcoming project while on the scene as well. Goldblum, it turns out, will star in Rick Alverson’s upcoming film The Mountain. And in keeping with the noteworthy indie director’s past features The Comedy and Entertainment, it sounds like a titanically ambitious interrogation of alienated psychology. Goldblum then dropped the most tantalizing description imaginable: “It reminds me in tone of P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood or The Master, metaphorical critiques of the American psyche, in the vein of Death of a Salesman.… It’s not for everybody, but I really like it, I keep working on it, and I like him.” If there is a kind God out there, this will be ready for Sundance 2018.