Acting in Wicked films “changed me”, says Jeff Goldblum, as he stops eating meat
Wicked’s anti-cruelty message has inspired several cast members, including Jeff Goldblum, to rethink eating animals.
Credit: Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic
Jeff Goldblum, the award-winning actor and musician, has revealed that he no longer eats meat as a direct result of starring in the Wicked films.
Cruelty to animals is a recurring theme in both Wicked: Part 1, of 2024, and the follow-up, Wicked: For Good, released on November 21.
In both films, Goldblum plays the villainous Wizard of Oz. In Part 1, he uses animals as convenient scapegoats; ‘The way to bring folks together is to give them a real good enemy,’ he says, referring to the animals. In Wicked: For Good, some of the animals are forced to leave Oz, in the hope of escaping to the mythical Lands Beyond Oz. Their marginalization serves as an allegory for real-life prejudices.
“After doing this movie ... I stopped eating meat and poultry,” said Goldblum, in a recent interview on the U.K. chat show, This Morning.
He had discussions with the Director, Jon M Chu, “about the animal cruelty” within the films, and added: “We need the world to work for everybody on Earth and every creature, too.”
Many of his Wicked co-stars are also opposed to eating animals, including Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, and Marissa Bode.
Erivo, who has been vegan for more than a decade, plays the role of Elphaba. In Wicked: For Good, Elphaba tries to persuade the animals to stay in Oz, by singing ‘No Place Like Home’.
Goldblum is not the first actor to stop eating meat while filming. In 2018, Woody Harrelson inspired his co-star Thandiwe Newton to adopt a plant-based diet, after meeting on the set of Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Back in 1995, James Cromwell, on just his second day of filming Babe, decided to embrace a vegan diet.
“I broke for lunch before everybody else,” he said. “All the animals I’d worked with that morning were on the table, cut up, fricasseed, roasted, and seared. That was when I decided to become a vegan.”
Cromwell has since become a committed animal rights activist, and, most recently, was the Executive Producer of Species Unite’s short documentary, 30,000 Monkeys in our Backyard.
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