The movies Jeff Bridges regrets making the most: “The jockey fell off the horse and you came in last”
In life, everyone experiences failure. It’s just how it is – no one can win all the time. For people in the public eye, such as actors, though, their failures tend to be hugely amplified by the fact they play out in front of the prying eyes of the world. Every actor worth their salt has seen one of their movies tank at the box office or a performance of theirs receive terrible reviews. It’s usually just something they have to absorb and resolve to take the right lessons from – and then complain about it in a tell-all interview somewhere down the line. Interestingly, ‘The Dude’ Jeff Bridges did just that when he made a couple of flicks in the early 2010s that he wound up regretting because they didn’t turn out as he’d hoped.
In 2013, Bridges signed up for RIPD, a comic book blockbuster co-starring Ryan Reynolds and Kevin Bacon. It probably sounded like a slam dunk at the time. After all, he was only five years removed from playing the villainous Obadiah Stane in Iron Man, which launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe and was the highest-grossing picture of his career. Similarly, Bacon had just made X-Men: First Class, which was well received, and Reynolds had made Green Lantern, which was…well, maybe the less said about that, the better.
When the action-packed supernatural comedy blockbuster was released, though, it died at the box office and was hit with some of the worst reviews of Bridges’ career. While his amusing performance as a rootin’ tootin’ ghostly Old West lawman was seen as the film’s lone high point, it was by no means enough to rescue the entire movie. A few months after its release, Bridges admitted that he agreed with the critics, telling GQ that when he saw the film, he was left “a little underwhelmed.” He didn’t lay the blame at director Robert Schwentke’s feet, though, instead musing, “For my mind, the studio made some choices that I wouldn’t have made.”
Bridges then made a superb analogy for a man who excels at playing ornery horse-riding gunslingers. “It’s kind of fun when the movie’s coming out,” he reasoned. “It’s like having a horse in the race and you’re rooting for your horse. And in this case, the jockey fell off the horse, and you came in last.”
The iconic Big Lebowski star didn’t have long to dwell on his disappointment, though, because an even bigger one was just around the corner. In 2014, Bridges starred in The Giver, an adaptation of a Young Adult novel that he’d actually been trying to bring to life since the mid-’90s. At that time, he saw it as a perfect vehicle to star alongside his father, Lloyd Bridges. To his chagrin, though, the film went through so many variations during a decade-plus in development hell that he wound up having to play the role he envisioned for his dad, who passed in 1998.
By the time the film was actually made, Bridges also had to cede control to disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, who was so notorious for meddling with film productions that his nickname was ‘Harvey Scissorhands.’ “I knew getting Harvey involved [would mean] I was going to have to let go of my vision because he had ideas,” Bridges admitted to HuffPost Live. However, he’d waited so long to get some version of the book he loved on the big screen that he told himself he should simply “take an adventure” and see if it turned out OK. “I just decided to do it sort of as a spiritual exercise in letting go,” Bridges philosophically explained.
However, the sanguine star admitted that he had “plenty” of regrets when it came to the project, which ended up so divorced from his initial intention that he barely recognised it. As he told Metro when he was picking over the bones of RIPD, though, “You know, that happens sometimes.”
