The Jeff Bridges movie he thinks is sorely underrated: “It was wonderful”
Aside from the fact that Jeff Bridges is one of the best-known names in Hollywood, it was also a path that was already laid out for him from birth. “I had questions about what I was going to do, and my dad would say: ‘Jeff, don’t be ridiculous, that’s the wonderful thing about acting, it’s going to call upon all of your interests,'” he once said.
Born into a well-established Hollywood family, Bridges would take that piece of advice everywhere he went, not just into his own space in the world of acting but elsewhere, too, like music, and his lesser-known project The Abiders. But this merely stemmed from a broader, deep-seated love for the art, blossoming the first time he fell in love with a certain Bob Dylan.
“Don’t tell anybody you don’t own fucking Blonde on Blonde,” he once told Music Radar. “Bob Dylan’s a lot to take in. Man, I just love Blonde On Blonde. What an amazing album all the way through. Of course, I’m into a lot all of his records, really. I’ve been following Dylan from the beginning, all the folk stuff and then on to the electric stuff, Highway 61 Revisited, and everything else.”
For Bridges, therefore, music and acting aren’t two distinctive disciplines but two forms of expression cut from the same cloth: a means to explore storytelling in ways that come from the visceral experience of their emotional cores. No matter the character he plays, you can’t help but notice the parallels in the work of his other musical influences, like Dylan, and how nuance and grit can form the perfect marriage when crafting well-rounded characters that stay with you forever.
This also means that, beyond the classics like The Big Lebowski, Crazy Heart and The Last Picture Show, there are some intense wild cards in the deep cuts of Bridges’ filmography, ones that he remains proud of to this day, even if they rarely come up when discussing his best works. One was The Amateurs, originally called The Moguls, about a man whose midlife crisis pushes him to explore a career in the porn industry.
“It was a wonderful film, got great laughs, and then it got picked up by a distributor who went bankrupt and took about five or six movies down with him,” Bridges reflected. “It’s a film that I’m very proud of, makes me laugh, I think people will like it.”
Despite the nature of Bridges’ seemingly biased endorsement, The Amateurs might have also suffered because of its limited release at the time. To rub salt in the wound, those who gave it a go sort of didn’t really know what to make of it, some saying it was nothing more than a cheap shot at that strange, familiar Hollywood-esque comedy without any focus on who its audience was supposed to be.
Still, it ranks highly on Bridges’ list, a list filled with all the weird and wonderful roles you might expect him to have been into from the get-go, like Tideland, released the same year as The Amateurs and unsurprisingly backed by Bridges as “the weirdest movie that Terry [Gilliam] has ever made, for my tastes.” A clear nod to the off-kilter and unexpected stories that Bridges became endeared to the moment he learnt the power of not pandering to anyone’s tastes but his own.
