The Oscar-nominated performance Jeff Bridges rehearsed in the nude
Throughout his career, Jeff Bridges has played a host of memorable characters, including ornery southern lawmen, a video game developer trapped in one of his games, an iron suit-clad supervillain, a car thief, and—of course—The Dude. He’s been nominated for seven Academy Awards and won one for playing an alcoholic country singer in Crazy Heart. However, he once revealed that he rehearsed for another of his Oscar-nominated roles in his birthday suit – and it was all caught on camera.
The early 1980s were interesting for Bridges, who started the decade by starring in a flop so colossal that it bankrupted a film studio. Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate had such a troubled production that it wound up quadrupling its budget—and then it made barely a fraction of that back at the box office. Many people blamed it for United Artists going belly up, and critics have even theorised that it caused Hollywood to get cold feet about giving directors so much power over their projects.
Bridges then starred in Tron, the cult sci-fi classic with a second sequel in 2025, and the rom-com Kiss Me Goodbye. After this, he returned to sci-fi for John Carpenter’s Starman in 1984, which landed him a nomination for ‘Best Actor.’ Given his status as the ‘Master of Horror’, the sci-fi romance of Starman was a change of pace for Carpenter, and it is still the only one of his feature films to receive any kind of recognition from the Academy.
In the film, Bridges played a floating ball of alien energy that cloned the body of a recently deceased man to give it human form, and his performance was appropriately—for lack of a better term—alien. While trying to puzzle out how this non-corporeal extraterrestrial entity would move while in its human form, Bridges had a unique idea.
As his cloned body was supposed to be nude at the start of the film, Bridges decided to replicate that in his rehearsals. So, he went to his office, took off all his clothes, and set up a video camera in the corner of the room. He then began pacing back and forth around the room with a choreographer pal, and they slowly but surely built the “Starman” from the ground up.
Naturally, this nude office movement session would have looked pretty odd to anyone who didn’t know what was going on – and Bridges told The Hollywood Reporter that he did receive an unexpected visitor at one point. He chuckled: “So I’m in my office, nude, in my corner, with a video camera on me, in this weird fetal position — and I remember my wife sticking her head in. There was this long, Jack Benny-ish look, and she just closed the door.”
These days, Bridges’ most iconic role is obviously the Dude in the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski, and most people can’t help assuming that amiable stoner is the closest character to Bridges’ real-life personality. However, his longtime friend T Bone Burnett – the legendary musician who composed the music Bridges sings in Crazy Heart – is adamant that isn’t the case.
Instead, he claimed, “A lot of people think the Dude is Jeff, but the character in Starman is closest because he seems to look at everything from outer space. Everything is marvellous to him.”
