The classic movie Jeff Bridges regrets not starring in: “It was a weird thing with my agent”
As one of Hollywood’s most distinguished veterans who literally made his screen debut as a baby, it’s crazy to think that Jeff Bridges was technically two decades into his acting career before he finally decided it was what he wanted to do with his life.
Sure, there were 19 years between his brief appearance in 1951’s The Company He Keeps and his first proper credit in Halls of Anger, but the point still stands. Not only that, but Bridges was already an Academy Award nominee before he finally committed to the family business.
He notched his first Oscar nod for The Last Picture Show in 1972, but it wouldn’t be until Lamont Johnson’s sports drama The Last American Hero two years later, which was his seventh credited performance on the big screen to go along with the nine different TV shows he’d guest starred in, that his mind was made up.
Earmarked for the top, Bridges lived up to that potential by establishing himself among the industry’s most promising youngsters. He landed his second Oscar nomination for sharing the screen with Clint Eastwood in Michael Cimino’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, which was released in cinemas when he was 24 years old.
Bridges struck up a friendship with the filmmaker and appeared in his first and third films. Between Thunderbolt and the infamous Heaven’s Gate, Cimino peaked when The Deer Hunter won five Oscars, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’. That begs the question of why he wasn’t asked to star in the haunting war drama, and the answer may have something to do with his representatives.
When Fade grilled the erstwhile ‘Dude’ about which roles he did or didn’t turn down, he cleared the air by saying he’d never been offered Richard Gere’s role in An Officer and a Gentleman, Harrison Ford’s part in Raiders of the Lost Ark, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, or Nick Nolte’s grizzled cop in Eddie Murphy’s breakthrough, 48 Hrs.
However, he stalled when Cimino’s masterpiece came up. “That’s possible. I remember The Deer Hunter,” he mused. “That actually might be true because I’ve worked with Mike, and it was a weird thing with my agent at the time. He dropped the ball.”
Who could he have played, though? It’s hard to imagine anyone other than Robert De Niro as Mike Vronsky, but he only joined the cast two weeks before the start of shooting after Roy Scheider dropped out, so it’s not out of the question. De Niro paid the insurance bond to guarantee the ailing John Cazale’s participation in the face of his cancer battle, so they were a package deal.
By the process of elimination, that leaves Christopher Walken’s Nick Chevotarevich, which won him an Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, a prize Bridges had been in the running for twice at the time. He may not have been in The Deer Hunter, but he did at least get to bring a hunted deer back to life in Starman, which got him on the ‘Best Actor’ shortlist for the first time in 1985.
