The role Jeff Bridges only played because a psychic said so: “I was freaking out”
As one of cinema’s most spiritual souls, who even inadvertently launched a religion when The Big Lebowski inspired Dudeism, it makes sense that Jeff Bridges would end up being cast in a movie because he came personally recommended by a psychic.
The bizarre thing is that it wasn’t the Academy Award-winning legend who convened with a medium, though, but the film’s writer and director. They were told in no uncertain terms that Bridges was the perfect guy for the job, and in a cosmic coincidence, he agreed.
After writing a pair of successful scripts in the early 2000s for the cheerleader comedy Bring It On and the first Sex and the City flick, as well as a couple of shoddy ones for Mark Wahlberg’s dire The Truth About Charlie and Michael Keaton’s banal First Daughter, Jessica Bendinger was ready to take the next step in her filmmaking career.
Pulling double duty for the first time, she penned and directed 2006’s Stick It, a dramedy about Missy Peregrym’s Haley, a gifted high school athlete happy to whittle away her natural talents until a court orders her to attend a prestigious gymnastics academy overseen by Bridges’ coach, Burt Vickerman.
Bendinger knew that because most of the ensemble needed to be filled with younger, largely unknown actors, she needed a name for the grizzled head of the gymnastics programme. Kevin Costner and John Travolta both turned it down, which saw her do what any reasonable person does when seeking advice on their feature-length debut from behind the camera.
“I was freaking out, so I did what all people in Hollywood do when they freak out; I called a psychic,” she explained to Vice. “I called a psychic that I love named Jo Madrid, who’s still around to this day. Don’t get me wrong; I make my own life choices, but every now and then I just want somebody to stick their finger into the wind of the unseen.”
After sticking her finger into the wind of the unseen, she had an answer. “I told Jo, ‘I sold this movie. I need somebody to play lead,'” Bendinger continued. “And she goes, ‘Hang on, Bridges, the good-looking one’. And I go, ‘Jeff Bridges?’ And she goes, ‘Yeah, the Bridges brother, the good-looking one.'” Fuck Beau, then, it would appear the spirit world doesn’t find him very easy on the eye.
On her psychic’s recommendation, the filmmaker “wrote him this letter in script form about doing the script, and then I heard, ‘Jeff will do a call with you.'” Bendinger and Bridges had a three-hour meeting, and he ended up accepting the part. Was it intervention from forces beyond our understanding? Probably not, since when he was presented with financial terms, a $3.25million salary was the “biggest offer” he’d ever received in his life.
If the psychic had named anyone other than Bridges, Bendinger could have been facing rejection from another household name and the actor would have been several million dollars worse off, so it worked out well for both parties in the end.
