'I WAS, AND AM STILL, SURPRISED BY EVERY OPPORTUNITY. I'VE BEEN CONTINUOUS AND FEEL AT THE TOP OF MY FORM' JEFF GOLDBLUM

Seth Brundle. Dr. Ian Malcolm. Grandmaster. Jeff Goldblum has played some titanic characters over his 50-year career, and is celebrating a half-century on our screens by going bigger than ever. First he played Zeus in Netflix show Kaos, and now he's the Wizard of Oz in Wicked. Total Film meets the man behind the curtain...

Jeff Goldblum, in person, is pretty much exactly what you expect from viewing Jeff Goldblum, the actor. Like The Fly's Seth Brundle and Jurassic Park's Dr. Ian Malcolm, he's all firing synapses and tumbling words that are irregularly separated by peculiar punctuation: staccato, syncopated, singular. His brain is like a brilliant computer that's not quite wired correctly.

Eccentric and witty, Goldblum is also impossible to keep on track, his answers liable to take hard left turns or plunge down rabbit holes. It begins the moment he pops up on Zoom, dressed smartly in a cream silk shirt and wide brown tie while perched in front of a towering painting of a military man on a horse. It's mid-September and he's in Florence, Italy, where his jazz band Jeff Goldblum and the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra is about to play the majestic Teatro Niccolini.

'Nice to see you,' he beams. 'It looks like you're in a dark, dark dungeon or something. What have they done with you?' Total Film explains that the sun's just gone in but the room will brighten again when it shines through the window. 'I'm coming to rescue you immediately,' he says, then rapidly changes tack. 'When you've lived as long as you have, for all these millennia, to live off the blood of other humans... you don't want to see that sun, do you?'