The Oscar-nominated role Jeff Bridges tried to get out of: “I can name a couple other guys”
In his defence, Jeff Bridges wasn’t even sure he wanted to be an actor for the rest of his life until he was almost ten features into his career, so the odd crisis of confidence can be forgiven.
However, informing the director of a movie that hadn’t even started shooting yet that he could recommend a couple of other actors who were better suited to the part he’d been cast in had the potential to become the ultimate act of self-sabotage, especially when the performance netted him an Academy Award nomination.
Even though he grew up in an acting household and was a frequent visitor to the sets where his father, Lloyd, would ply his trade, music was always Bridges’ first love. His older brother, Beau, went straight into the family business, but it wasn’t until The Iceman Cometh that the younger sibling finally decided that his dreams of becoming a recording artist should be secondary to his onscreen exploits.
Fittingly, the film he tried to back out of was the one that firmly cemented his reputation as one of Hollywood’s brightest young talents. Bridges secured his first Oscar nod in the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ category for Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, which was released when he was only 21.
The picture that he wasn’t convinced he should be a part of was another feather in the cap, making him a two-time nominee by the age of 25. He was working with a first-time director and a veritable icon of the silver screen, and all it took was one conversation to convince him he was better off hanging around.
“I remember going into Thunderbolt and Lightfoot,” he recalled, per Mary Ellen Mark. It was Michael Cimino’s first film, and I said, ‘You really want me for this part?’ He said, ‘Yeah, you’d be great’. I said, ‘I know I’m kind of shooting myself in the foot here, but I can name a couple of other guys who’d be better. I just don’t feel like this guy.'”
Although Bridges was excited about playing a major role opposite a legend like Clint Eastwood, he was “frightened because I didn’t really feel that I had this guy in me.” Fortunately, Cimino was on hand to put any doubts he may have had to rest.
“Cimino said, ‘Don’t you get it? It’s like a game of tag. You get tagged, and you’re it. So the guy is nobody else but you,'” he explained. “That took a lot of pressure off me, feeling I had to be something other than what I was. I’m attracted to things that challenge me and stretch me, and it’s funny because I don’t like to be challenged.”
Cimino’s road-tripping crime caper won Bridges plenty of plaudits and continued his ascension, even if the actor was so adamant he wasn’t right for the part that he tried to worm his way out of it.
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