Jeff Goldblum

Gene Siskel said Goldblum got stiffed out of a Best Actor Oscar nomination for The Fly (1986) because Academy voters don't honor horror films. The film was Cronenberg's biggest commercial success, $60.6 million against a $9 million budget, and it established the character Goldblum would play for the rest of his career: the scientist who talks in circles until something catastrophically wrong happens. Jurassic Park (1993) gave that character a blockbuster stage. His stammering delivery started as an accidental take on Invasion of the Body Snatchers that director Philip Kaufman liked. It stuck.

Somewhere along the way, Goldblum became a meme of himself, then became his own genre. The Netflix series KAOS (2024) cast him as Zeus after Hugh Grant dropped out, which is its own kind of compliment. He plays the Wizard in both Wicked films. But the stranger story is the jazz: his band, the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, has been running for 30 years, and his 2025 album Still Blooming features Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo and topped Billboard's Jazz Albums. He plays the Ryman Auditorium. At 73, his side career has more critical credibility than most people's main ones.

Before Hollywood paid the bills, Goldblum was selling pencils, including to correctional facilities. He grew up outside Pittsburgh, his father a doctor who had almost become an actor himself. His brother Rick died young, a loss that reportedly left a lasting mark on him. He's been a jazz pianist since childhood, well before anyone was writing press releases about it.