The genre-defining classic Jeff Bridges turned down: “He’d have been a megastar”
If there’s one actor who’d be named the most likely to have zero regrets whatsoever from their career, then Jeff Bridges would be near the top of the list. After all, he’s The Dude, both onscreen and off, and the easy-going icon has no time or interest in looking back and wishing for what might have been.
It’s been almost 75 years since he made his screen debut, and over 50 years since he began working consistently, which also means he’s covered almost every bit of ground the industry has to offer. Name a genre, and Bridges has almost certainly appeared in it at least once, if not many more.
He’s one of Hollywood’s most popular presences, a grizzled veteran, and an altogether winning personality, never mind his status as one of his generation’s most accomplished, decorated, and consistent performers, with his first and seventh Academy Award nominations separated by 45 years.
Bridges is a star, of that there’s no doubt, but had he been more interested, he could have been a superstar. Plenty of movies have sounded like a bad idea on paper before becoming classics, and based on how many big names turned it down, a loose adaptation of Roderick Thorp’s novel, Nothing Lasts Forever, seemed to be one of them.
Of course, when it arrived on the big screen in the summer of 1988 as John McTiernan’s Die Hard, the action genre was never the same again. The gun-toting masterpiece endures as one of the all-time great actioners, rocketed Bruce Willis to the top of the A-list and set the stage for his action hero ascension, and spawned a thousand thinly-veiled imitators, which continue to roll off the production line on a regular basis.
After being offered to Frank Sinatra first out of contractual obligation, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, Richard Gere, Paul Newman, James Caan, and many more turned down the part of John McClane, and it turns out that Bridges was among that number.
In a conversation with The Guardian, the actor’s K-PAX director, Iain Softley, reflected on Bridges’ decades-long stint as one of cinema’s most overlooked and undervalued players, suggesting that if he’d have been the one running around the Nakatomi Plaza with his shoes off, he’d have been set for life.
“At one stage, Jeff had been offered the part that eventually went to Bruce Willis in Die Hard,” the filmmaker revealed. “Now, if he’d taken that role, then he’d have been a megastar, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with good or bad acting. It’s arbitrary. At that time, Jeff was slightly bemused whenever the word ‘undervalued’ came up in relation to him.”
As Softley recalled, Bridges waved away any suggestions that he wasn’t receiving the credit he was due because “he’d always been able to do the movies he wanted to do, so where was the problem?” A salient point, which explains why he wasn’t interested in being sucked into the blockbuster machine. Still, it’s fascinating to imagine what Die Hard would have looked like with him in the lead.
