The movie Jeff Bridges called a “$200m student film”
People get bitten by the acting bug at different stages in life, but considering Jeff Bridges was only 14 months old when his first on-screen appearance in The Company She Keeps was released in January 1951, perhaps he was always destined for a career on the silver screen.
It would be another decade before he put it into practice, with various smaller roles on television eventually leading to his proper feature debut in 1970’s Halls of Anger. Ever since then, Bridges has built up an eclectic and acclaimed body of work over the following half a century, and his star has remained undimmed throughout it all.
With seven Academy Award nominations and one win to his name, Bridges has become synonymous with strong character work, fierce professionalism, and unwavering commitment, something he accomplished without having to dip his toes into blockbuster waters all that often. When it came to the biggest project of his career from a budgetary standpoint, though, he was amazed to discover how loose the set was.
Jon Favreau’s Iron Man remains both the costliest movie he’s ever starred in and the biggest box office hit of his career, but the script was in a constant state of flux. The film’s director and leading man, Robert Downey Jr, leaned heavily on improvisation, which initially left Bridges bewildered when he showed up.
“Then came the first day of shooting, and Marvel kind of threw out our script that we had been working on, said, ‘No, that’s no good. It’s got to be this and that,’” he said to Vanity Fair. “And so there was a lot of confusion about what our script was, what we were gonna say. We’d spend hours in one of our trailers going over lines and saying, ‘Oh you play my part, I’ll play your part,’ exploring how we were going to do it.”
That wasn’t what he expected from a vastly expensive, action-packed adventure with so many moving parts to consider, but once he wrapped his head around it, Bridges was all in. “It drove me absolutely crazy until I made a slight adjustment in my brain that was, ‘Jeff, just relax. You’re making a $200million student film. Just relax and have fun,'” he continued. “And that kind of did the trick because here I get to play with these two incredible artists and just jam, and that’s what we ended up doing.”
Bridges was an excellent foil for Downey Jr’s Tony Stark as the villainous Obadiah Stane and even got to realise a lifelong professional dream of his by shaving his head completely bald for the part. Student films and Marvel movies couldn’t be more different, but for Iron Man‘s antagonist, they were basically one and the same.
