‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’: The role Jeff Bridges didn’t think he was good enough to play
Jeff Bridges always maintains an easy-breezy persona of effortless cool, which made him the perfect choice for the role of The Dude in the seminal stoner comedy The Big Lebowski, as well as one of the more endearing movie stars given how unconcerned he seems with fame. After starting out as a teenager and becoming one of the youngest actors to win an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ after his performance in The Last Picture Show, Bridges took to Hollywood like a duck to water and continued to have a career that has led to some of the most beloved films.
However, despite his carefree nature, the actor spoke about one role that led him to doubt himself.
While his filmography is rather sparse, Michael Cimino has created some groundbreaking films over the years, being most well-known for The Deer Hunter in 1978. However, the director worked with industry legend Clint Eastwood in 1974 on Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, which also starred Bridges.
The film follows a bank robber who tries to organise a daring new heist with the help of a young sidekick and some old friends. Bridges was acting alongside Eastwood at just the age of 24, something that would be understandably intimidating for any newcomer. Because of this, Bridges initially felt quite doubtful about his ability to hold his own next to the actor, eventually speaking to Cimino and expressing his concerns about portraying the character.
When discussing this, Bridges described the unique tactic that Cimino used to boost his confidence, saying, “I remember with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, I really was concerned about it. I knew we were going to shoot in a couple of days, and I really wasn’t feeling the part, and I wasn’t sure why they hired me… All that stuff. It was Cimino’s first film, but he did a very wise thing: He said to me, ‘You know the game Tag?’ And I said, ‘Yeah’. And he said, ‘Tag — you’re it’. And what that meant to me is that whatever thoughts I had about playing the guy didn’t really really matter; I was the guy. It’s like if you’re playing yourself and you didn’t feel like it, it doesn’t matter. Whatever you thought, whatever you feel, whatever you did is going to be right because you’re the guy”.
Sometimes, all you need is a jolt of belief from someone else to take on a task that daunts you. In the case of Bridges and his role in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, he needed to quite literally feel a strike of urgency in order to set him on the right path, encouraging him to approach it with an ‘all systems go’ type attitude.
While he initially doubted his ability to star in this project, it was another successful film within his impressive early streak, leading to subsequent roles in Starman, The Contender and True Grit and defining him as one of the most effortless Hollywood stars of all time.
