Jeff Goldblum on reinventing Greek myth for Netflix’s Kaos: “Zeus is horrible and cruel”

Wearing garish West Coast casual and shades, Zeus suffers from, as Goldblum has it, “psychological wounds and vulnerabilities”. He frets and throws thunderbolts into the heavens. When not fretting he takes calls from his brother Hades, down below in the underworld, and summons Prometheus, wisest of the gods – whom he has chained to a rock to suffer the eternal torment of having his liver torn out by an eagle – for fraught poolside conferences, unaware that Prometheus is helping to bring about his downfall.

Goldblum’s Zeus, I suggest, is more than a little like an ageing and paranoid Hollywood star – one who’s not getting the big parts any more and is cross with his agent. “You know, it’s sort of adjacent to it,” he says, cheerfully. “Anybody who has suffered through not only showbusiness megalomania, or over-identification with your press, or your current stock in a very kind of seething and unreliable, up-and-down marketplace, but [also] anybody who doesn’t know when life may end.” That feels like an admission. “These myths from the start were meant to be human stories,” he explains, “which allow us humans to understand ourselves a little better.”

Is being a film star like being a Greek god – not very good for your happiness? “How we misidentify with our little identities in one way or another, and our successes, and what we hang on to, is not really the deepest part of who we are,” says Goldblum, thoughtfully. “Not to get too highfalutin, but we have to have a reckoning at some point, if we’re to get healthy, you know? I shouldn’t put so much stock in my house and my car, or my reputation or my career, I need to be in alignment with nature.”

Zeus has no time to realign with nature; there are pressing family issues to be dealt with. His son Dionysus wants more responsibility beyond his usual territory of drinking and debauchery, and his wife Hera, played with imperious disdain by Janet McTeer, is also his sister and is actively plotting Zeus’s downfall. No wonder he loses his temper. “Yes, I can see where it comes from,” says Goldblum. “But you can’t keep blaming your family and your father, you have to take responsibility for, and own up to, and make amends for, your own hostilities and violence.”

On the whole, I suggest, males both mortal and immortal don’t come out of Kaos very well. “It’s not that simple,” Goldblum counters. “There are powerful women characters and some rotten male characters, but I think Prometheus – played by Stephen Dillane, who’s fantastic – is deeply good; moral, ethical and exemplary. And my own son, Dionysus, has a deep, pure aspiration and appetite for love.” Dionysus is played by the British actor Nabhaan Rizwan, and Goldblum is a fan. “Nabhaan is a fantastic fountain of some kind of energy source, which is multifaceted and spectacular,” he says, adding, “he’s a fine fellow with a spectacular physique.”

The series has a large ensemble of actors giving great turns. David Thewlis as Hades and Dillane’s Prometheus stand out, plus entertaining cameos from Billie Piper and Suzy Eddie Izzard, but there is a particular, crackling pleasure in the scenes between Goldblum and McTeer. “Janet is all by herself – a lighthouse, a planet, the whole, deeply powerful constellation,” says Goldblum, who may have a good word for everyone he encounters but really goes some for McTeer. “There’s a deep, still reservoir of something magical. Gazing into her eyes, playing these scenes with her, I felt like she opened me up like a fresh oyster, opened more completely than I ever had been in my life.”

That long life on screen began in 1974, with a bit part in Michael Winner’s Death Wish. After increasing attention brought by roles like the scientist who turns into a bluebottle in David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), Goldblum became a global star playing mathematician Ian Malcolm in the Jurassic Park films from 1993 onwards. He has also branched out as a jazz pianist of some repute, crediting his interest in the form to his brother Rick who died, aged only 23, in 1971. “Zeus is semi-musical with his throwing of bolts,” he says. “I think Zeus would probably like good jazz, but he’s got his challenges, stuff to work out.”

I’d guess that Goldblum has worked his own stuff out, as there’s a pervasive, almost zen contentment about him. Apart from the successful career he has, unlike Zeus, apparently finally cracked family life. Previously married to the actors Patricia Gaul and Geena Davis (his co-star in The Fly), in 2014 Goldblum married Canadian contortionist Emilie Livingston, 30 years his junior. The couple, who live in the Hollywood Hills, have two sons, Charlie Ocean, nine, and River Joe, seven. Home life, the way Goldblum describes it, sounds centred and happy. “After we put the kids to bed, we put ourselves to bed pretty quickly, because we have to get up the next day. I play piano myself every day, I’ve got homework to do. And then I get the kids through their piano practice every day. As luck would have it, I’m reading a book to my kids every night about the Greek myths and going over all these characters.”

Goldblum is keen to recommend Stephen Fry’s retelling of the Greek tales – Mythos (2017) and Heroes (2018) – “I’m a little pally with him,” he says of Fry. “He’s very brilliant.” But like many Americans of his generation, Goldblum – one of four siblings brought up in 1950s-60s Pennsylvania, where his father was a hospital consultant and his mother worked on radio – first properly encountered the world of Greek myths at the movies. “I had very little of it in school,” he says. “But I saw Jason and the Argonauts when it came out in the 60s and then I caught up with Clash of the Titans [1981].”

The Greek myths are endlessly reinterpretable, and Covell’s version in Kaos feels like a commentary on events in the western world today. The Kretans share their island with Trojan refugees, brought there after the fall of Troy. These refugees, Kretans are told, are their real enemies – not the Zeus-worshipping authoritarian state that governs them. Did it feel like a metaphor for our times when they were making the show? “It can certainly be taken that way,” says Goldblum. “But I think these things, power and class, and hierarchies, fights for status, the forces of love and family, have been with us for as long as anybody can remember.”

Zeus’s problem isn’t his diminishing power as much as having power in the first place? “That’s what the interesting element is for me,” says Goldblum, pleased to find me approaching enlightenment. “His all-too-human struggling with psychological complications that arise from his not being able to accept his own vulnerability, frailty, and all the real sources of power. Not the made-up power to which he aspires, the position of authority, which is a fake authority, but real power and where it comes from.” Which is? “Vulnerability, or the acceptance of your alignment – even for the gods!” Zeus just needs to get more chill, like Jeff.

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• Hugh Grant replaced by Jeff Goldblum in Netflix's KAOS

KAOS will premiere on Netflix on 29th August 2024. Sign up for Netflix from £4.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

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