Jeff Goldblum is married to an Olympic gymnast. At ten, Emilie Livingston moved to Novogorsk near Moscow to train, without her family. (“One thing about the Russians, they have no mercy,” she later said.) At 16, she won the gold medal in rhythmic gymnastics at the Pan American games. She excels in ribbon and ball work, and in aerial silks, for which she had a rig set up in the garden. “Her workouts are radical, as you can imagine, and impressive,” says her husband, sitting close on a sofa in a BBC dressing room, pipe cleaner thin in black. He has a habit of tipping his head back and pausing during his rapid speech, as though catching pepper in his nose.
Goldblum’s daily routine is as punishing as his wife’s. He rises at 5am to do 45 minutes of cardio and weight resistance during her parallel work-out: “I’m glad to do it, and I feel not-good if I don’t do it.” He then embarks on what he describes as his “workload of piano”; he’s had a piano in every house he’s lived in and has just released his second jazz album with his band, the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra. As a child he’d forget to practise, and each week, before his lesson, he would hope his teacher had been involved in a car accident. But as an adult, practising became more pleasurable. “The discipline/freedom part goes like this: putting a little time in, making it a habit in some way, the daily stuff, and that’s how I’ve lived.” The same goes for his acting. Goldblum trained with the New York theatre guru Sanford Meisner, whose techniques focused on the “reality of doing”. Forty-five years of movies followed: The Fly, Independence Day, Jurassic Park. He has the script for Jurassic World 3 and is already running lines, although it doesn’t start filming till June. In the past, he’d cram – “I would say: cancel all my everything else” – but that is “very painful”, he says, compared to the little-by-little approach. After he finishes piano practice, at 7.30 each morning, Goldblum makes eggs for his two young sons.
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