Jeff Goldblum Developed A Detailed Backstory For His Independence Day Character

It's not an uncommon practice for actors to create backstories for their characters. Viola Davis, for instance, has said she always writes a biography after reading the script. Before filming "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," director Alfonso Cuarón had Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint write essays about their characters — with Grint ignoring the assignment, because he figured that's what Ron Weasley would have done. Being an old pro in the business, it shouldn't come as a surprise to learn that Jeff Goldblum takes a similar approach when creating a character.

Not every character is going to have a detailed history when it comes to the script, after all. And unlike the "Potter" actors, you're not always going to have thousands of pages of books to comb through to help you along the way. This is particularly true of a movie like "Independence Day," which wasn't adapted from any pre-existing works and was more focused on the spectacle than forming fully fleshed out characters. People bought tickets to see the aliens, the action, and the explosions, and not to learn how Will Smith and Vivica A. Fox's characters met.

But not having much to work with was never a problem for Goldblum. Being a famously colorful and larger than life personality in his own right, it didn't take much for him to create a detailed, intricate, and — in true Goldblum fashion — predictably bizarre history for his genius character David Levinson.

Given that Jeff Goldblum has arguably become more fascinating to his fans than the characters he plays (to the point where he has a show in which he travels around being simply dazzled and delighted by, well, pretty much everything), his backstory for David is probably on par with what you might expect: weird, unnecessarily complex, and bafflingly dark. In his mind, David's father had been a World War II veteran who had later sent him to martial arts training. As Goldblum expanded to GQ in 2016:

"I think I had an athletic and multifaceted capacity for that. And I became very, very, very good. Dangerous, even. I ascended very quickly, along with becoming a piano player and a techno kind of student and master in some ways, until one day something happened in school. A big bully, a troublesome guy, was giving a hard time to somebody. Something unexpectedly emotional and passionate rose up in me. And I put him in the hospital. He almost died."

Now, whether any of that — outside of being technologically savvy — registers on screen is up for individual interpretation. Obviously, David is a tech expert and almost singlehandedly solves the problem of how to defeat the alien invaders in the film. That said, given he was also apparently secretly a martial arts master, would it have killed "Independence Day" director Roland Emmerich to give him one little scene showcasing the ways in which his fists are E.T.'s worst nightmare?