The only movies that exceeded Jeff Bridges’ expectations: “God, this is terrific”
Most of us will decide on what we’d like to do for a career around the time we hit 20, once we’ve realised that the morning exists before 12pm and that you can’t survive solely on Super Noodles, Monster energy drinks and rolled-up cigarettes.
But if you’re born into an acting dynasty, like Jeff Bridges, you may find yourself working before you’ve even started walking or eating solid food.
Son of Airplane legend Lloyd, the future Big Lebowski star can probably claim to have one of the longest continuing acting careers in history, thanks to starting off in an uncredited role as a baby back in 1951’s The Company She Keeps and continuing to appear on the big screen all the way through ‘til, well, now.
In between he has had the kind of career that has Hollywood Walk of Fame cement providers licking their lips, as he appeared in monumental movies including 1971’s coming of age drama The Last Picture Show, which earned him an Oscar nomination, dazzling ‘ahead of its time’ sci-fi Tron, and the alcoholic country singer smash Crazy Heart, which won him the biggest acting prize of all in 2009.
Bridges has pretty much done every kind of movie genre you can think of, from big-budget Marvel fare to independent westerns, and it’s the latter that he probably gets associated with most. An example of it was his fine work in 2016’s Hell or High Water, an engrossing crime thriller written by man of the moment Taylor Sheridan that featured Chris Pine and Ben Foster as brothers pulling off bank robberies to raise funds to save their family home.
Bridges is superb as the grizzly Texas ranger tasked with tracking them down in the film directed by David Mackenzie, a British director who had made an early Jack O’Connell prison drama called Starred Up a few years earlier.
Bridges said, “I saw Starred Up, and I was really impressed with that. That’s another low-budget film, and I said, ‘Look what this guy did with this low budget film.’ I was so moved by the story, so impressed, and I thought, ‘I can see that working well with Taylor’s script.’”
On a budget of just over $10million and without too much marketing, Hell or High Water was a revelation, bringing in four times that at the box office and picking up four Oscar nominations, including a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ shout for Bridges and one for ‘Best Picture’ overall.
It exceeded the expectations of all involved, and Bridges added, “It was so satisfying, I always have high hopes when you go in, and every once in a while. Your hopes get transcended, and that was the case with this one. I thought they did a beautiful job.”
Hell or Highwater wasn’t the only movie that ended up doing better than the veteran actor had hoped, as he explained: “Well, Lebowski comes to mind. (And) Last Picture Show. When I saw it (Lebowski), I said, ‘God, this is terrific.’ But it didn’t catch on too much. But now it’s really built up some momentum.”
The Big Lebowski was the 1998 Coen Brothers comedy crime movie that has become one of the biggest cult cinema classics in history, with Bridges’ dressing-gown clad character ‘The Dude’ becoming standard Halloween dress-up fare ever since.
With few roles left that Bridges hasn’t played in his eight-decade career, we’ll hopefully now see him as God in Terry Gilliam’s much-delayed Carnival at the End of Days, co-starring Johnny Depp, although the former Monty Python man said late last year that a lack of funding could put paid to the whole project.
