‘Texasville’: Jeff Bridges on the role he loved to play again
Jeff Bridges comes across as one of the most easy-going movie stars in Hollywood, existing in a similar camp to Jeff Goldblum and Ryan Gosling in how effortlessly laid-back he is and not reflective of the demands of such a high-stakes industry.
Through his work on projects like The Big Lebowski, True Grit, and Hell or High Water, the actor has shown the many facets of his acting ability by playing stoic and weathered characters as well as the endlessly cool (and perhaps more accurate to his persona in real life) Jeffrey Lebowski. However, he started out his career as a teenager, with his first breakout role remaining as the one character he’d love to play again.
Peter Bogdanovich is one of the most influential directors from the New Wave of Hollywood, with the likes of William Friedkin, Francis Ford Coppola and Bob Rafelson defining an era of auteurs that shook up the studio system and brought back power to the directors. The Last Picture Show, released in 1971, follows a group of aimless teenagers in a small town in Texas, finding themselves inevitably stuck on the same sad path as their parents as they try to escape the trappings of suburbia and create new lives for themselves.
The film earned him Academy Award nominations for ‘Best Director’ and ‘Best Screenplay’, going on to create What’s Up Doc? in 1972 and Paper Moon in 1973, which is one of the most beautiful and endearing films of the decade.
Bridges starred in The Last Picture Show when he was just 22 years old, which led him to be nominated for an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ and is still one of the youngest actors to achieve this honour. He plays Duane Jackson in the film, a teenage boy who is lovestruck by the local ‘girl next door’ and tries his very best to sweep her off her feet.
The film remains a devastating story about the circumstances that trap people and prevent them from making the most out of their lives, with the ending being a sobering wake-up call to the prison of the American Dream and small-town life. When describing his work on the film, Bridges described the process of repeatedly working with a director, saying, “…It’s a lot of fun to do this, and doing it with Tron you know was a wonderful experience, especially having [Steven] Lisberger on board, the guy who wrote it and directed it. And I go to do that with another movie, The Last Picture Show, twenty years later we did Texasville”.
The project that Bridges describes is called Texasville, which exists as a partial follow-up to the characters explored in The Last Picture Show. Bridges expanded on this, explaining, “And now I was just in Texas with Peter [Bogdanovich] and we’re looking at doing the next instalment of the Texas—there’s actually five books that Larry McMurtry wrote about those characters and so we’ve done two and we wanna do the next thing. I don’t know if that’s ever happened before, you know every 20 years goin’ back and doin’ that. So that’s something that I’m hopin’ will come about”.
While it is lesser known compared to its predecessor, the opportunity to expand on characters you’ve previously played is not one that arises often, and Bridges was glad to reprise his character and continue working with Bogdanovich.
