Jeff Bridges names the “most evil” character he ever played: “It just spilled out of me”
In a career that has spanned nearly six decades and roles of all kinds, it’s still difficult to remember a truly despicable Jeff Bridges villain.
Sure, he shaved his head, donned a big ol’ suit of armour, and tried to kill Tony Stark in Iron Man, and has also played a man accused of brutally murdering his wife in Jagged Edge, but for most of the movie, the audience didn’t know whether he did it or not.
And, yes, he also played an armed robber masquerading as a priest in Bad Times at the El Royale, but once again, that part traded on the fact that Bridges is associated with being a kindly, laid-back nice guy, ‘The Dude’, if you will.
However, despite his default setting as the ‘loveable long-haired stoner dad/grandad’, he credits one role with being the “most evil” he’s ever attempted. It ain’t Obadiah Stane, Jack Forrester, or Donald ‘Dock’ O’Kelly, either, despite all three of them being pretty dastardly folks. Instead, he credits the dead-eyed chemistry teacher Barney Cousins from 1993’s The Vanishing as the worst of the worst.
In fact, this educator may have been even more villainous than the slimy Walter White, who traded his chemistry smarts to become a murderous meth-cooking drug kingpin, felled by the hand of fate. In contrast, Cousins merely used his knowledge to chloroform Sandra Bullock and bury her alive, before doing the same to her boyfriend, Kiefer Sutherland, three years later; you know, the usual lunch break activity before a jaunt to the staffroom.
When Bridges was first hired to play Cousins, he began his process of inhabiting the role the same way he does any other. “I always look inside myself and see what aspects might line up with the character,” he revealed to The Stranger in 2014, “I’ll accentuate those, then kick the aspects that don’t line up with the character to the curb and let it bubble up that way.”
However, it proved difficult for the actor to work out which parts of himself were similar to a man who considered it acceptable to purposely kill a woman and torture her boyfriend as part of an existential experiment into the nature of evil.
Intimately familiar with the material, as The Vanishing was director George Sluizer’s attempt at an American remake of his own 1988 Dutch/French Spoorloos, he had a solution for his struggling star. He told Bridges to write an essay detailing Cousin’s thought process and basically flesh out the character’s motivations in theory before practically applying himself to playing him. At first, Bridges wasn’t exactly thrilled with the idea, noting, “I thought it was going to be a stupid homework assignment”.
Amazingly, though, as soon as he put pen to paper, it all started to take shape faster than he get the words out. “It just spilled out of me in this wonderful way, incorporating parts of my own life,” Bridges marvelled, “It really made me arrive at the reasons how and why the guy I played became this way.”
In the end, Sluizer’s advice had such a profound impact on the man that he noted, “It was one of the best pieces of direction I’ve ever had,” despite the fact that the filmmaker never helmed another mainstream Hollywood movie again.
Unfortunately for Bridges, who managed to deliver a truly chilling performance, by the time it was all said and done, it became clear that audiences didn’t really want to watch him embrace his dark side. The movie was a critical and commercial disaster, condemning that one time he played a truly evil son of a bitch to the bargain bin of movie history.
