“I took mescaline three times with people from the Playhouse…That same year I took acid, and it was the last time I did anything like that,” Goldbum revealed.
The ever quirky and wonderful Jeff Goldblum smoked “grass” and dabbled in psychedelics back in the day, but these days, he does not even indulge in so much as caffeine.
The 66-year-old actor—who appeared in Jurassic Park, The Fly, Independence Day and many more—described his early drug experimentation as a young thespian in a recent conversation with Vice.
Jazz Cigarettes
While discussing his film The Mountain—in which Goldblum plays Wally, a traveling salesman type trying to prove the legitimacy of the transorbital lobotomy—he was asked if he has ever smoked a “jazz cigarette.”
Goldblum’s candid response revealed that he was no stranger to “grass” even at an early age. “My mom kind of had a left-out feeling of youth culture as the kids came into the late 60s, wherein things started to happen,” said Goldblum. “So she not only tried starting to smoke grass herself, but started to grow it in our backyard in Pittsburgh and would give it to us and everything.”
While he did not “smoke with her much,” Goldblum was introduced to hash by his older brother. “The first thing I ever smoked was hash and a pipe. He was going to college and had this funky apartment, and I went over. He put on The Beatles… and we smoked the stuff. It was just fantastic.”
After moving to New York at the age of 17, Goldblum smoked grass “here and there” starting in his first year at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. That summer, he got his first professional job in the theatre at Shakespeare in the Park.
“I took mescaline three times with people from the Playhouse… That same year I took acid, and it was the last time I did anything like that. But I had interesting trips all of those times.”
This was the extent of the actor’s drug experimentation. “Never did cocaine, ecstasy or mushrooms.”
He had a brief relationship with alcohol, but gave that up along with caffeine and any other “enhancement,” as he called it.
Straight As An Arrow
“Since then, I just experimented with drinking as a kind of freedom enhancer here and there, but it quickly ran out of steam,” he said. “In my life and in my work, I’ve gone straight as an arrow. I used to drink coffee in the last decade or two to kinda, you know, get ready for a thing like this even. But about five years ago, I gave that up entirely and religiously and don’t have any caffeine or anything. All my steam you see now is from my own imagination and my own having gotten a night’s sleep. I like to have a nice night’s sleep and a nice breakfast. And then I figure out how to put some attention on the challenge and opportunity at hand and see if I can solve it that way. I don’t do it with any enhancement.”
