Jeff Goldblum is The Tall Guy

Written by: Chris Hallam
Published: Sunday 2nd February 2025

The most rampant and frenzied comedy sex scene in British film history. A pair of singing underpants. A West End musical based around the life of the Elephant Man. All three play a crucial role in The Tall Guy, the winning British film comedy released in June 1989.

The Tall Guy was a film of firsts. It saw future Oscar-winner Emma Thompson make her first ever big screen appearance. It was the directorial debut of TV funnyman Mel Smith. It was also the first screenplay by Richard Curtis to be filmed, hitting the screens years before Four Weddings And A Funeral, Notting Hill or Love Actually.

Both Smith and Curtis make brief cameos in the film. Curtis plays the pivotal role of "man going into a toilet" early on while the then much more famous Mel Smith plays a drunken party guest who collapses into a heap later on.

But in discussing a film that turns out to have a surprising amount about elephants in, perhaps we should begin by discussing the obvious one standing in the room: namely, why is The Tall Guy called The Tall Guy?

Okay, so it does star the American actor Jeff Goldblum. At 6ft 4in tall, Goldblum was (and presumably still is) undeniably a tall man. He towers over everyone else in the film, while some of the publicity for the film seems to exaggerate his height still further.

But let's be clear: the film is not ABOUT him being tall. It barely even comes up. Nor, for that matter, does the fact that he is an American. The truth, of course, is that Curtis's screenplay - originally called Camden Town Boy - was not written with Goldblum in mind. Curtis was persuaded to change the film's name to broaden its international appeal. (This didn't work.) The Pennsylvania-born Goldblum was cast after a writer's strike made it hard for him to find work in Hollywood: thus The Tall Guy was born. In fairness, it's difficult to think of a better title. The Actor? The American? The Stooge? An American Non-Werewolf In London? The Tall Guy it is.

Goldblum plays Dexter King, a wannabe actor employed as a stooge by a much-loved comedian called Ron Anderson (Rowan Atkinson) whose comedy show, The Rubberface Revue, is enjoying its fifth year of popular success. Dexter's role mainly sees him being punched, kicked and generally humiliated by Anderson night after night on stage. The trouble is Anderson is no kinder to Dexter behind the scenes, denigrating him for making even the slightest slip-up. Above all, Anderson resents anyone else stealing the limelight. "If you ever do anything funny in my show again, you big elongated droplet of dung, you're out! You dig me?" he berates him at one point. "F-U-C-K-E-D, out!"

On another occasion, Dexter makes the mistake of confiding in him about him about a personal problem. "Then for fuck's sake talk to someone about it," is Anderson's response. "And sort it out before I sack you and hire a lobotomised monkey to play your role. OK?"

In reality, of course, "Ron Anderson" is clearly an evil alter-ego for Atkinson himself. Atkinson was indeed frequently often called 'Ron Anderson' or something similar himself back in the days when he was so anonymous that people still regularly misheard his name. The real Atkinson clearly relishes the opportunity to play a villainous version of himself on screen, even lending out one of his own highly collectable automobiles to stand in for one supposedly belonging to Anderson.

Although Rowan Atkinson only has a smallish part here, he already had a good working relationship with writer Richard Curtis. As a young student, Curtis had started out writing sketches for Atkinson and Mel Smith at Oxford University more than a decade earlier, before moving on to write for and with Atkinson on television, first in Not The Nine O'Clock News and then the second to fourth Blackadder series. Blackadder Goes Forth (which would also see the main character having a fling with a nurse) was in fact first broadcast only a few months after The Tall Guy was released.

Atkinson's next major success, Mr. Bean, would arrive in 1990, co-created by Atkinson and Curtis. Another key writer for the series was Robin Driscoll, who also appears briefly in The Tall Guy as a jobbing actor in one scene set in a talent agency.

Not all of Dexter's problems are down to his job. He shares a house with Carmen (played brilliantly by Geraldine James), a fun-loving nymphomaniac with an insatiable appetite for men and sex. Dexter's sexual history has been much less happy: as a series of flashbacks reveal, he has demonstrated some appalling judgement over the years, particularly where fashion, his own facial hair and women are concerned.

Everything changes when Dexter claps eyes on hospital nurse Kate Lemmon (Emma Thompson), with whom he becomes immediately smitten. He has been in hospital seeking a cure for a number of allergies that (much to Anderson's annoyance) have led him to sneeze unexpectedly on stage. Having solved this problem, Dexter proves much too shy to follow Carmen's simple, homely advice (namely, to get her number, then "bonk her to within an inch of her life") and soon starts manufacturing reasons to get more injections (thus ensuring he gets to spend more time with her). He first invents an upcoming trip to Morocco, before finally feigning an interest in taking up nursing himself as a career.

Surprisingly, Dexter does finally pluck up the courage to ask Kate out properly. This culminates in a hilariously over-the-top sex scene incorporating first a bed, then a piano, various assorted foodstuffs, before climaxing with the happy couple falling naked but satisfied out of Kate's wardrobe onto the floor of her flat, her room now completely wrecked by the chaos resulting from their vigorous and joyous extended bout of lovemaking.

Although not as polished as Curtis's later screenplays such as Four Weddings And A Funeral, The Tall Guy undeniably has a lot of charm. Thompson and Goldblum, in particular, work very well together. Though he had been cropping up in films as diverse as Death Wish, Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers and The Right Stuff, Goldblum was at this point best known for slowly turning into a giant insect in David Cronenberg's 1986 feature The Fly. In time, thanks to Jurassic Park and Independence Day, he would latch himself onto two of the most lucrative science fiction franchises ever. Back then, however, Hollywood seemed unsure what to do with him; his tall physical frame and unusual, slightly Christopher Walken-esque speech cadences rendering him unsuitable for conventional leading man roles.

Here, though, he demonstrates his comic abilities well with a script full of funny lines:

"No, not at all! It could have been worse," he attempts to reassure Kate, when she admits to being embarrassed by her surname, 'Lemmon'. "You could have been called Hitler or Tampon, or something."

Later, he shouts a curse through a door at his nemesis, Ron Anderson. "I hope all of your children grow up to have very small dicks!" he begins. "And that includes the girls!"

Emma Thompson is great in her first film role. Then just entering her thirties, Thompson had become an increasingly familiar face on British TV throughout the Eighties in both comedy and drama. The previous year, 1988, had seen a surprisingly vitriolic media reaction to her self-titled TV sketch show, Thompson, but she had received acclaim for her dramatic performances opposite Robbie Coltrane in Tutti Frutti and Kenneth Branagh in period drama Fortunes Of War. She would return to the big screen again with Branagh (with whom she was now in a relationship) in his own version of Shakespeare's Henry V. Needless to say, she has enjoyed a glorious career incorporating dozens of films and two Academy Awards in the years since.

With Kate and Dexter united, the film changes gear with an enjoyable montage sequence set to Madness's 1981 hit It Must Be Love, featuring a cameo from Suggs himself. This is the bit where the singing underpants come into it - alongside a sequence in which the entire stage audience sing along. It is the most upbeat moment in the film: Kate and Dexter are happy together and we see her clearing out his terrible wardrobe, Superman pyjamas and all.

The Tall Guy is a very London-orientated film. Anyone who knows the city well, especially those who knew it in 1989, will be delighted to see a wide variety of locations. As with many films, however, the geography makes no sense at all as Dexter takes any number of bizarre landmark-dotted routes to cycle from A to B.

In addition to those already mentioned, there are a few celebrity cameos. Presenters Melvyn Bragg and Jonathan Ross both appear as versions of themselves, as does, less predictably, Are You Being Served? star John Inman. Director Mel Smith also manages to get his comedy partner Griff Rhys Jones mentioned in the script.

Although not yet particularly famous, Angus Deayton crops up at one point: Deayton himself was Rowan Atkinson's real-life stooge at the time. Then in his twenties, Emma Thompson's future Harry Potter co-star, Jason Isaacs, meanwhile, makes his film debut playing a surgeon in a dream sequence. Future Bridget Jones creator Helen Fielding is also credited as a special script consultant.

Without spoiling too much of the plot, it seems fair to reveal that much of the later film is taken up with Dexter's new job playing the lead in Elephant, a new Andrew Lloyd Webber style musical inspired by the story of Joseph Merrick, the 'Elephant Man'.

Dexter initially scoffs. "Remember dearest, everyone thought Jesus Christ Superstar was a stupid idea," his agent - played by the late Anna Massey - reminds him.

"Jesus Christ Superstar was a stupid idea," Dexter retorts. As with Springtime For Hitler in The Producers or even Stop The Planet Of The Apes, I Want To Get Off in The Simpsons, there's plenty of fun to be had seeing how much effort has been put into the show-within-the-show. In this case, much of the humour arises from the strong link the musical's producers have forged between the unfortunate Merrick's condition and the life of an actual elephant. Dexter's make-up (which ensures he remains unrecognisable in a lead role and never has to speak nor sing a word) thus includes a small trunk.

"Somewhere, up in heaven, there is an angel with big ears," the musical ends. Another song refers to him "packing his trunk". Later, we hear the director plotting a follow-up production about Richard III featuring a song entitled I've Got A Hunch I'm Gonna Be King. It all sounds simultaneously absurd while also strangely plausible.

Generally speaking, The Tall Guy has aged pretty well. The cast is perhaps a little over-white, Dexter's actions are occasionally questionable (at one point he abandons a date in a night-time London park simply because he has grown tired of her) and he perhaps gets off the hook too easily at the end. As in all of Richard Curtis's works, a character called 'Bernard' is at one point made to look foolish - a lifelong act of revenge against his onetime love rival and now Conservative politician, Sir Bernard Jenkin. In this case it is the name of one of the naked men who hangs around Carmen.

In 1989 The Tall Guy proved a modest success at the box office in the UK and in Europe. Today, Emma Thompson and Rowan Atkinson are well-known throughout the US, but in 1990 when the film opened opposite one of the best movies of the decade (Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas) almost no one there knew them at all. The plucky, British comedy sank without trace at the American box office.

Undeterred, in 1991 Curtis began writing a new screenplay. At the age of 34 he calculated he had attended 65 weddings in the past eleven years. He had not yet married himself, however, and was haunted by the memory of a missed opportunity with a beautiful female guest at one such celebration. He wondered if there was enough there to inspire a new film. Surely most people could relate to the experience of going to a wedding?

Fast approaching four decades since it was made, The Tall Guy remains a likeable and unique snapshot of a screenplay from a romantic comedy master at the dawn of his career.

The Tall Guy

Actor Dexter (Jeff Goldblum) is a straight man in Ron Anderson's (Rowan Atkinson) stage revue. Dexter gets fired but falls in love with a nurse (Emma Thompson) and gets a job as the star of a musical version of The Elephant Man, only to lose his girl by sleeping with an actress from the Elephant company. Mel Smith directs.

First released: Monday 24th February 2003

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• Region: 2
• Discs: 1
• Minutes: 88

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