The Rogue's Gallery

Jeff Goldblum may be back in theaters as the Wizard in Wicked: For Good, but the actor, musician, and fashion plate doesn't make his magic only on screen. Now, for his next trick.

- BY JUSTINE HARMAN

Jeff Goldblum runs early.

I know this because I run early too, and I've only just beaten him to our table, which would be too small for two normal-size adults and is definitely too small for one Jeff Goldblum. He swans onto the outdoor patio of the Chateau Marmont in head-to-toe Prada, a brand for which he is an occasional runway model. We say hello with a come-here-you hug, and then he wordlessly secures a larger table, because the sheer scale of the man next to a bistro table is too much for anyone to bear.

We have never had a movie star quite like Jeff Goldblum. He's comically large—six-foot-four, Lurch territory in Hollywood—and almost subversively handsome. The son of a Pittsburgh radio broadcaster and a physician has starred in some of the highest-grossing films of all time, including Jurassic Park and Independence Day, worked regularly on Broadway and in the West End, and appeared on hit TV series across five decades. When he's not acting he's touring as pianist for Jeff Goldblum & the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, for which he occasionally sings. The band's latest album, Still Blooming, features guest vocals from Scarlett Johansson; one recent gig was a book party for the author Loretta Rothschild. (Yes, those Rothschilds.) He's known less for the lines he reads than for the idiosyncratic way he reads them: his trademark punctuation, half growl, half gibberish. He's 73, and his good looks have somehow only fortified since he first burst onto the screen in Annie Hall—all big hair and bobbing Adam's apple—to deliver a single line: "I forgot my mantra!"