“You can’t win them all”: the controversial 1988 movie Jeff Bridges was desperate to be a part of
It’s rare for a veteran actor to navigate their way through a storied career without becoming caught up in at least some sort of controversy, but Jeff Bridges has done a damn good job of making it easy.
Offscreen, he ruffles no feathers. Like many of his generation, he dabbled in psychedelics and continued to find the lure of marijuana irresistible as he got older, but he was never the guy to be caught stumbling out of clubs, punching paparazzi in the face, or caught red-handed with a face full of blow.
Onscreen, he hasn’t made many dicey movies. There’s Heaven’s Gate, but that was less controversial and more a shitshow from beginning to end, while The Contender didn’t sit too well in certain political corridors of power for depicting a presidential scandal right in the aftermath of Bill Clinton’s fellated faux pas.
However, if he’d gotten his way, the Academy Award winner would have played a key supporting role in one of the most controversial pictures of its era, one that spent years fighting an uphill battle to flee development hell to make it onto the silver screen, and when it did, there was an inevitable uproar.
Under normal circumstances, producers and studios would be falling over themselves to green-light a Martin Scorsese passion project. The Last Temptation of Christ was no mere passion project, though, and even dipping a toe into religious waters can stir up a tsunami of negativity, which is exactly what happened.
There was backlash from Christian groups, death threats being sent the director’s way, the threat of bans and boycotts, hundreds of protestors picketing the studio in opposition to the film’s existence, heavy censorship and outright bans, and an arson attack on a cinema for daring to screen it, which left over a dozen people injured.
Casting Jesus Christ was a nightmare in itself, with Robert De Niro turning it down and Christopher Walken being vetoed by the studio before Willem Dafoe stepped in, but if Scorsese wanted to streamline his casting process, then he had a top-tier actor almost literally begging him to play Judas Iscariot.
“I wrote to Scorsese, but I don’t remember his response,” Bridges recalled, with The Last Temptation of Christ the one and only time he’d written directly to a filmmaker to lobby for a part. “I guess when Harvey Keitel got the role, that was my answer. You can’t win them all.”
Bridges’ laid-back persona might make him seem like an odd choice to play the man who betrays Jesus and sells him up the river to the Romans, but this was a pre-Lebowski world, where the star hadn’t yet become synonymous with abiding, whatever the cost. Keitel was great, yes, but Bridges would definitely have been more interesting.
