Jeff Goldblum confirms his role in ‘Wicked’
Jeff Goldblum will no longer deny rumors he’s going to defy gravity – the actor has confirmed he will star in the upcoming film Mean. Following reports last year that the 70-year-old was in final talks to star in the long-awaited film adaptation of the popular musical, Goldblum further confirmed Jimmy Kimmel Live for the first time that he’s actually going to take a trip to Oz – “I was just on the set of Mean. I’m not supposed to talk about it. But it was back and forth.”
It was reported that Goldblum would be appearing in the role of the magician, joining the star-studded cast, which has been confirmed Cynthia Erivo as Elephaba, Ariana Grande as Glinda, Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible and Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero. Praising his co-stars Erivo and Grande, the actor said, “You should see our witches … they’re very good.”
Production on the film began in December 2022 with filming in London, where the actor revealed his children joined him on the set. He went on to say that we “portrayed her in preparation for the role The Wizard of Oz, one of my favorite movies. It was too scary for her,” with the actor even admitting that he relived a childhood fear of witches while filming the new adaptation: “I’ll tell you. I wasn’t supposed to talk about it, but one day I was filming and I burst into tears of fear, a childhood fear came back to me.”
Following the film’s initial announcement in 2016, the film’s release date was pushed back to December 2024 from an originally planned 2019 date, before then being pushed back a month to November 2024. It was also announced by the film’s director Jon M. Chu that the project would now appear in two parts. The director explained, “As we prepared this production over the last year, it became increasingly clear that wrestling the story of was going to be impossible Mean into a single movie without actually doing any damage to it. When we tried trimming songs or trimming characters, those decisions felt like fatal compromises with the source material… So we decided to give ourselves a bigger canvas.”
Joining Chu behind the production cameras are some of the cast from the original Broadway production; Stephen Schwartz And Winnie HolzmanCo-writers of the play’s music and lyrics will return to adapt the script, along with the returning producer Mark Platt.
part one of Mean is scheduled to hit theaters on November 27, 2024. Check out Goldblum’s comments below:
