West End Prisoner Jeff Goldblum on Mixing Laughs and Angst Onstage

Film star Jeff Goldblum first trod the boards in London in 2008, partnering Kevin Spacey in a whiplash-smart production of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow at the Old Vic that left critics reaching for superlatives—and at a loss to describe just how tall Goldblum looks on stage. (A giraffe was the image most commonly invoked.) This summer, the 57-year-old alumnus of Jurassic Park and The Fly returns to London to co-star with Oscar and Tony winner Mercedes Ruehl in a revival of Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue. Under the auspices of Old Vic Productions, the comedy is directed by 2010 Tony winner Terry Johnson (La Cage aux Folles) and opens July 13 at the Vaudeville, running through September 11. Broadway.com caught the actor in genial, gregarious form one recent morning, before the demands of the day’s rehearsals had kicked in.

You wowed the London critics in Speed-the-Plow. What enticed you to return?
Kevin [Spacey] brought this up. He said, “We’re doing this thing, which is a dream of mine, to have the Old Vic Theatre present something on the West End and I know you’ve got this little space of time between your series [Law & Order: Criminal Intent], so perhaps you’d like to do something.” Says I, “Would I ever?” So then we scoured about and came up with the idea of this play, which you’ll have to tell me about. I’ve never seen it on stage!

Richard Dreyfuss did it on the West End a decade or so ago. But you must have seen the 1975 film, with Jack Lemmon as Mel Edison, the advertising exec you are playing now.
Through the years I had flicked by it on TV, seen chunks of it, and then I sat and watched the whole thing. Lemmon is spectacular, of course, [and] Anne Bancroft is spectacular. When this came up, I found that the more I re-read the play, the more I enjoyed it, although I don't know—the guy I’m playing is supposed to be 47.

I’m sure you can get away with that.
Well, we’ll see if the audience laughs: “47? Did he say 47? Who’s he kidding?” If that rings out audibly, I think we’ll need to make an adjustment or two.

Between this, the Mamet and The Pillowman several years ago in New York, you’re doing more theater these days.
You know, I never know how things actually occur. Well, I mean, I do make the choices—and I started in theater and have always been romantic about and enthralled by the theater. I first thought of being an actor when my parents in Pittsburgh took us to see children’s theater when I was a kid. It was that more than any other thing that made me go, “Who are these people? What are they doing backstage? How do you do that?” I would get very perceptibly excited. When I thought of being an actor, it was being onstage.

Was Broadway part of your childhood?
My parents, being stagestruck, would make regular trips to New York and come back with cast albums and Playbills from My Fair Lady or whatever. I first went to New York when I was in the fourth grade which must have been— what?— 1961. We went to Radio City Music Hall to see a movie, if I recall, and perhaps to Greenwich Village, which was this supposedly arty place we visited where someone drew a charcoal portrait of me on the street which I no longer have [laughs]. But Jesus, if I’d known then what I know now in terms of the stuff I could have seen— in 1971, by which point I was living in New York, I could have seen Peter Falk on stage [in the original Prisoner of Second Avenue, opposite Lee Grant].

True, but you were onstage yourself in 1971 [in the Tony-winning musical Two Gentlemen of Verona, first in Central Park and on Broadway].
I’m lucky in that I’ve had continual chances to work in one way or another over the decades now and from smaller things to more adventurous things. Not only did I start thinking of myself first as a stage actor but luckily I studied with [the late] Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse. One of the things he taught, along with a passion for the work and a seriousness about the work, was that his two-year foundation course was exactly that: a foundation that would set you up on a 20-year adventure after which you could call yourself an actor, and from which came a life of continued upward progress.

Is that how your career feels to you, like something continually evolving?
More and more I’m doing what I emphasize to my acting students in L.A., which is [exploring] what it means to be an actor. It’s about more than career elements; it’s about making acting a central part of your daily life. Musicians do it: They continue to practice. I think it’s much the same thing, which is to say that as an actor, I more and more enjoy eating bigger, more nutritious meals that make as full use of me as possible, and from which I can learn.

At least on stage, that exploration seems to involve lots of British directors!
Aren’t they great? I had the greatest experience on Speed-the-Plow with Matthew Warchus, and now I’m working with [2010 Tony winner] Terry Johnson. I saw La Cage in New York and I had a spectacular time. I’d seen the French movie, the Mike Nichols Birdcage and also the Gary Beach revival a few years ago, with whom I had just worked, but I thought what Terry did was very unusual. I just loved his vision of the show. So I thought, “This is going to be good. He’s a genius. He’s terrific.”

It’s fascinating how timely The Prisoner of Second Avenue seems in its portrait of downsizing and the stress that comes with an economic meltdown.
This play has its own unique flavor. Although it’s hilarious and enjoyable—it’s a Neil Simon world—it’s also rich and deep in that people start suffering very conspicuously about one thing or another. The love story, at least in our interpretation, is about two people who are very much soulmates whose life is jeopardized when one or the other crashes temporarily or goes through a very painful birthing process to a new realization. Not to compare it to Death of a Salesman or Odets, but there are similar issues: A character goes through this consumerist attachment to things—this “more is better” credo—that turns out to be corrupt and barren. I actually say in the play, “Why does $2 of food become $3 worth of packaging and why are we wasting money on what people say we need to have?”

Who’d have thought it: Neil Simon as existentialist?
But he is! The play asks, “Who am I?” I’m not making this up, Mel says it in the play. He says, “I don’t know who I am anymore,” once he starts to lose the things in life with which he has so strongly identified himself: his job, his role as breadwinner and husband. In the play, I question who I am, which in turn becomes an opportunity to find myself in a wiser, more balanced, more peaceful place than ever. At the end, it’s implied that Edna [Ruehl’s character] is going to catch up and we’re miraculously going to be together. Isn’t that something?

It is. Will the play transfer to Broadway?
Who knows? At the moment, I’m just loving being back in London.