The death scene that saw Jeff Bridges injected with real drugs
The characters Jeff Bridges has played across his long and bountiful career have done some pretty mad stuff. Jack Prescott battles the eponymous ape in King Kong; Jack Lucas goes after the Holy Grail in The Fisher King; and Jack Forrester goes on trial for the brutal murder of his wife in Jagged Edge. And then there’s all the stuff from the characters not named Jack.
Though he often used the same stuntman, Lloyd Catlett, for some of his most dangerous feats, Bridges isn’t afraid to get down and dirty himself. For The Old Man, the Hulu TV show he stars in, he performed a number of his own stunts, even after a long battle with cancer and Covid-19 left his health in a perilous state. None of this compares to what he did for the film Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, which is one of the craziest stories you’ll ever hear from a movie set.
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, directed by Michael Cimino of Heaven’s Gate, stars Bridges as the eponymous ‘Lightfoot’, a young criminal who steals a car at the beginning of the story. He ends up accidentally rescuing a ‘preacher’ from being assassinated. It turns out that this ‘man of the cloth’ is actually John ‘Thunderbolt’ Doherty, a notorious bank robber being hunted by members of his former gang. The two men form a close bond and embark on a series of jobs together, all the while being pursued by Thunderbolt’s former colleagues.
The film is notable for its ending, which comes as a proper punch to the gut. The main characters are driving along a desert road, thinking they’re both in the clear, when Lightfoot begins acting strangely. His face starts to droop on one side; the result of a brain haemorrhage caused by a head injury he sustained in a fight. He dies suddenly, right next to his friend Thunderbolt, who is left bereft, forced to just keep on driving. It’s pretty harrowing stuff, but it gets even more insane when you realise what was going on behind the scenes.
Speaking on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, the Oscar-winning star told the legendary talk show host how they went about capturing this pivotal scene. “I go up to Mike [Cimino] and I say, ‘Mike, I’ve got an idea’,” Bridges recalled. He told his director that while he could “hold a half blink pretty good”, what he wanted to do was find a dentist who could “shoot me with novocaine on the side of my face”.
Unbelievably, Cimino agreed. “So we did that,” Bridges continued, “And it worked great”.
Novocaine, the common trade name for the drug procaine, is a widely used local anaesthetic, particularly popular in the field of dentistry. While most medical professionals consider the drug to be very safe, it can cause incredibly bad reactions in certain people. The fact that some random dentist was willing to administer it to an actor is shocking.
Not only was this idea incredibly dangerous, but it was also totally pointless. “They lost the film,” Bridges revealed, “We had to do it again”.
It turns out that, after all that fuss, Bridges was able to pull off the scene all on his own, no performance-enhancers required.
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