The one role Jeff Bridges said he was born to play: “That’s what this felt like”
Most people would assume, and with good reason, that if there was one role that Jeff Bridges was adamant he was born to play, it would be ‘The Dude’. However, it’s not Jeffrey Lebowski.
The Coen brothers’ iconic creation has become the character that he’s most synonymous with, and Bridges is happy about that, going so far as to name his band The Abiders, and he knows that when people approach him in the street, that’s the movie he’s most likely to be asked about.
Is ‘The Dude’ his most iconic role? Absolutely, nothing else comes close. He may have been acting since the 1950s, and he’s played plenty of memorable parts in countless memorable pictures, but none of them are anywhere near as woven into the pop culture fabric as the dressing gown-wearing pot enthusiast.
If he hadn’t become an actor, Bridges would have tried his hardest at succeeding as a musician instead. Fortunately, once he’d succeeded as an actor, he was in the position to indulge his musical proclivities, both onscreen and off, with the star crooning in several films and releasing a smattering of records.
When those two loves were combined to a greater extent than ever before, it was only natural that he’d give one of his greatest performances and reach the pinnacle of his professional life, with his standout turn as Otis ‘Bad’ Blake in Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart winning him an Academy Award for ‘Best Actors’.
It was a case of all of the right stars aligning at the right time: he was the perfect age to play a washed-up, booze-soaked, fading country musician, it allowed him to showcase his picking and his pipes, and the script was written with him in mind. That said, the first time Bridges was offered the gig, he turned it down.
It wasn’t until his long-time friend, jamming partner, and fellow Coen brothers regular, T Bone Burnett, boarded Crazy Heart that he agreed to sign on the dotted line, and it was the best decision he could have made. Watching the movie, it felt like the part he’d been born to play, and the man who played it would wholeheartedly agree.
“Every once in a while, you get a part you feel you were born to do,” Bridges mused. “And that’s what this felt like.” From the second Cooper’s musical drama premiered, he was basically the nailed-on favourite to claim ‘Best Actor’ at the Oscars, which is what should be happening when an actor is cast as a character they were destined to bring to the screen.
Crazy Heart isn’t necessarily the best thing he’s ever been in, but that says more about Bridges’ longevity and the strength of his filmography as opposed to the quality of the film itself, but Blake more than lived up to his billing as the character he’d been waiting on for his entire life.
