(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Wed 26 November 2025 14:30, UK
Jeff Goldblum has led a charmed life in Hollywood, working as both a leading man and a character actor and somehow managing to enjoy the best of both worlds.
Most actors are forced into one realm or the other, but he has thrived equally as a leading man, appearing in cult classics like The Fly and grown-up box office hits like The Big Chill, and also as a character actor, flitting from success to success, including (to name a few), Jurassic Park, a handful of Marvel movies, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Wicked.
Along the way, he’s maintained whatever Goldblum-y essence got him there: a combination of laid-back charm, wolfish good looks, unexpected line delivery, and the ability to seem as though he is always acting in a totally different film from his co-stars. There is, allegedly, a certain contingent of the film-watching public who are not fans of Mr Goldblum, but they are at odds with a remarkable list of directors. Since making his debut as Freak Number One in 1974’s Death Wish, Goldblum has worked with auteurs including Robert Altman, David Cronenberg, and Steven Spielberg.
There was one director who always evaded him, though, and in a 2010 conversation with Rotten Tomatoes, the actor rattled off five of his favourite movies, one of them being David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. After expressing his appreciation for the film, Goldblum revealed that he wanted to collaborate with the surrealist filmmaker, saying, “I just think he’s spectacular”, but sadly, Lynch passed in 2025, never having made a film with the Jurassic Park actor.
Of all the directors out there, you might think that Lynch was the most likely to be on Goldblum’s wavelength, as he marched to the beat of his own drum, dreamed up characters who never adhered to the pesky conventions of the real world, and earned celebrity status as an iconoclastic, accidental philosopher.
All of these things could be said of the actor, but where Lynch’s creativity seemed to stem from a deep earnestness and warmth toward the world, Goldblum’s has always seemed centred on theatrics. He’s more likely to join a circus than become a monk, while Lynch was exactly the opposite; in fact, their wavelengths might have clashed entirely.
Another reason they may not have worked particularly well together is that Goldblum is Goldblum. If he’s in a movie, he will be operating as himself, always, where it doesn’t matter if the film is tragic or comic or devoid of anything approaching either (Mortdecai).
Lynch, on the other hand, had a way of working with actors that transformed them into his artistic vision. Sometimes, he would communicate with actors using nothing more than a wave of the hand, or he would tell them something cryptic but evocative, like when he told Laura Harring to “walk like a broken doll” while directing her in Twin Peaks. Naomi Watts, who starred in Mulholland Drive, described feeling like she was putty in his hands, saying that, although she and the other actors didn’t always know what was going on, they trusted Lynch to guide them to the right place.
It’s hard to imagine how Goldblum’s very specific acting style would fit into all this magic, but perhaps Lynch could have been the one to bring out a totally different side to him. He might have been the perfect actor to play Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, for example, though Dennis Hopper certainly made a case for himself, and one wonders what he might have made of the role of Dr Jacoby in Twin Peaks. We’ll never know, and as far as Lynch fans are concerned, that is probably for the best.
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