The first movie that made Jeff Goldblum cry: “I found myself getting unexpectedly weepy”

One of cinema’s most widely beloved eccentrics, Jeff Goldblum, has reached a point in his career where it seems like he’ll never be required to play anyone or anything other than Jeff Goldblum again.

While he seems happy to cash in on his status as an idiosyncratic icon, there are audience members out there who can’t remember a time when his number one calling card was that he was a good actor. These days, if Goldblum’s name appears in an ensemble, there’s a 99% chance everyone knows what they’re going to get.

There’s nothing wrong with that, and history is littered with thespians who did nothing but play themselves in perpetuity, but younger generations might get a shock if they stumble across David Cronenberg’s The Fly and expect Goldlum to approach the role of Seth Brundle with the wacky uncle shtick he’s been relying on for the last two decades.

Deep Cover, Adam Resurrected, The Big Chill, Silverado, The Tall Guy, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers are just some of the films where the star dials down his usual antics and puts his habit of “Jeffing it up” to the side in favour of character and performance, and he’s uniformly great in all of them.

Knowing that he prefers to use a hundred words when ten will do, the assumption would be that Goldblum reflecting on the first movie to reduce him to a sobbing emotional wreck would fly off on several tangents and ultimately settle on a completely unexpected title nobody would imagine being capable of causing floods of tears.

Mercifully, that wasn’t the case. However, he did use the rumours that he’d fallen off a cliff and been declared dead as the jumping-off point. “It was trippy,” he said of everyone assuming his clogs had been popped in New Zealand before invoking a 1962 comedy starring Gene Kelly. “Remember that movie, Gigot?”

Jackie Gleason stars as a mute janitor who struggles to find a place in society, and after becoming transfixed by the power of religion he starts frequenting local funerals, crying every time. It’s a famous tear-jerker, and one that Goldblum was unable to resist.

“It was the first movie I ever remember getting weepy at,” he explained to Movieline. “Getting moved by. Of course, he’s a poor soul, a town misfit who the town thinks has died. And he hasn’t, and he peeks behind a tree at his own funeral when they decide how much they care for him. And he starts weeping. I was in the theatre. I was, I don’t know, eight, and I found myself getting unexpectedly weepy.”

He’s far from the only one to be left a blubbering wreck by Gigot, and he remembers the film so vividly it became seared into his brain as a formative memory of the power of cinema.

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