The Oscar-nominated performance Jeff Bridges gave stoned out of his mind: “We’re dead”
Before shooting the climactic scene of only his second feature film, director Rod Lurie sent an intern to get a hold of his star: the man, the myth, the legend, Jeff Bridges.
When the intern returned with no Bridges in tow, Lurie raised an eyebrow and sent a production assistant to coax the star out of his trailer, but they too reported that he refused to leave, and the nerves began to truly set in. What was going on? Why wouldn’t Bridges, who was playing the President of the United States in Lurie’s political thriller The Contender, come to set? Was he having second thoughts about the elaborate speech he was pencilled in to shoot that very day?
With a sense of barely suppressed anxiety, Lurie knocked on Bridges’ trailer door with bated breath, and upon opening, found himself face-to-face with a huge cloud of marijuana smoke that almost knocked the young director off his feet. To his horror, he realised the actor wasn’t doing some last-minute prep but was completely out of his gourd. At a Clinton Presidential Centre event in 2025, he remembered exclaiming, “Jeff, you’ve got a three-page speech to give!”, but the actor barely acknowledged his hysteria.
To Lurie’s surprise, he seemed totally nonplussed at the idea of shooting such an involved scene in his nicely toasted state. He invited the director inside the trailer and began to get dressed in his presidential garb. As the slackjawed filmmaker watched him slowly pull his trousers on and fumble with the buttons of his shirt, he couldn’t help thinking, “Oh my God, we’re so screwed. We’re dead. That’s my second movie. I’m never going to work again”.
To add an extra level of absurdity to the situation, Lurie, who miraculously didn’t get contact high from the secondhand smoke, was forced to listen to Bridges’ stoned ramblings; he clearly had the munchies because he spent a lot of time waxing poetic about the excellent cobbler at a nearby inn, and with every word, the director could feel himself losing his cool. “I go, ‘Jeff, do you know your lines?'” Lurie recalled, to which a befuddled Bridges replied, “What lines?”
At this point, all the colour drained from Lurie’s face as he imagined the disaster that was about to befall his movie when Bridges got to the pulpit to shoot his big scene. Of course, it also didn’t help matters that, when he stumbled to his mark, he gazed around at all the extras assembled for the scene, and drawled, “Dude, there are a lot of people here”. Cue Lurie trying desperately not to tear his own hair out.
However, when Lurie called “action!”, he received a great lesson in respecting different people’s processes. Bridges’ entire demeanour transformed in an instant, and he proceeded to deliver the speech perfectly, as if he’d been preparing for it all day and night. “Boom,” Lurie remembered with a huge grin, “He completely changes. Becomes super presidential. Gives the speech, nails it in one”. Ultimately, the director might have been worried about his play-president’s methods, but he certainly couldn’t argue with the results. Six months later, Bridges was rewarded for his pot-assisted performance with a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ nomination at the Oscars, and Lurie had the mother of all anecdotes to tell.
Of course, it’s hard to hear this tale of Bridges being stoned out of his mind on-set without thinking of his most famous character: Mr Jeffrey ‘The Dude’ Lebowski. Astonishingly, though, despite ‘His Dudeness’ being arguably the most perpetually stoned character in cinema history, Bridges is adamant he touched nary a spliff, bong, or edible while making The Big Lebowski.
You see, he knew the Coen brothers were sticklers for their dialogue being said exactly as scripted, and he desperately wanted to nail its rhythms as written. So, he abstained from the herb, telling Yahoo in 2014, “I really wanted to have all my wits about me. I didn’t burn at all during that movie”.
