The movie that almost made Jeff Bridges quit acting: “I really didn’t want to work again”
Jeff Bridges has been acting for a long time. In fact, he’s been acting for nearly his entire life. Now in his 70s, The Big Lebowski star got his very first onscreen gig when he was a year old and continued to dip his toe into show business throughout his childhood. If his parents hadn’t been creatures of Hollywood, he might have waited a little longer, but he often says that their acting careers actually discouraged him from joining the family business.
From an early age, Bridges was more interested in pursuing other creative paths, especially music. But at a certain point, his pesky theatrical talent got the better of him. The precise moment came in 1971 with Peter Bogdanovich’s melancholy ode to small-town America, The Last Picture Show. Barely in his 20s, Bridges suddenly found himself nominated for an Academy Award and showered with acclaim and attention. Things could definitely have been worse, but it wasn’t exactly a dream come true for him, either.
Not sure about what to do next, he signed on to make another movie, The Last American Hero, a thinly veiled biopic charting the hard-scrabble ascent of Nascar driver Junior Johnson (named Junior Jackson in the movie) to the top of the racing circuit. It received decent reviews, but it was not an easy movie to make, especially for a 20-something would-be itinerant artist who didn’t really want to be famous for acting.
Instead of feeling creatively fulfilled and fired up from all that speedy driving and stunt work, he felt drained. “There’s a certain muscle that’s used when you act, and maybe it’s not a physical muscle, but certainly it’s an emotional one, and after making a movie, you feel wiped out,” he said in an interview years later.
He was also struggling with the one thing that a lot of actors rely on as a form of therapy, saying that he didn’t actually enjoy pretending to be someone else. “I was feeling these emotions after Last American Hero,” he candidly admitted, adding, “I really didn’t want to work again. Maybe not never, but certainly not for a few months anyway.”
Despite being in one of the most enviable positions an up-and-coming actor could dream of, the young Bridges was desperate to pump the brakes on the runaway train of his stardom and take some much-needed rest. Instead, he was bullied into getting back to work. When he turned down the opportunity to make The Iceman Cometh with a handful of Old Hollywood luminaries like Frederic March and Lee Marvin, his Last American Hero director called him up and read him the riot act.
“I understood that to be a true professional,” Bridges recalled sheepishly, “You have to work even when you don’t feel like it.” A sad realisation that all of us, at some point or another, must reach.
Luckily for the movie-viewing public, Bridges really internalised that bit of shouted-at wisdom and has continued to act, whether he wants to or not. Without that phone call, we might not have gotten ‘The Dude’, a decent version of Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne’s wasn’t), or any of his grumbly, bearded characters from the past few decades. And that would be a true loss for cinema indeed.
