When Jeff Bridges accidentally led to his brother’s hospitalisation on set: “I thought he was acting”
How can someone like Jeff Bridges, cinema’s most beloved laid-back, good-natured stoner dude, actually put a hurtin’ on his older sibling so severe that he had to be taken to the hospital with a suspected broken hand? Well, depending on which brother you ask, the incident has a few different origin stories.
In 1989, Jeff and Beau teamed up for The Fabulous Baker Boys, a romantic dramedy about two brothers with a failing piano act, who hire Michelle Pfeiffer’s sexy lounge singer Susie Diamond to play alongside them to rescue their career from oblivion, until the younger brother falls in love with her and the wheels come off in spectacular fashion.
The film was a labour of love for the siblings, with the Big Lebowski star gunning for Beau as co-lead. At the time, the latter was primarily known as a TV star and was nowhere near as well-known as his brother, but Beau insisted to Entertainment Weekly that Jeff told studios, “No, I want my brother to play it”, adding with a smile, “He really provided me an opportunity”.
However, when it came time to shoot one of the film’s climactic scenes, Beau’s gratefulness almost flew out the window. The sequence began with the ivory-tinkling brothers having a screaming match, airing all their various grievances before it devolved into a physical altercation. Eventually, Jeff’s character threw Beau’s against a chain link fence several times before grabbing his hand and threatening to break his fingers so he can’t play the piano anymore.
Beau brilliantly sells the pain of Jeff bending his fingers, or at least, that’s what he thought was happening. “When he said, ‘Ah! You’re hurting my hand’,” Jeff sheepishly admitted to The Times, “I thought he was acting, and I just kept going, thinking, ‘Mmm, he really is acting well’.” To his horror, it turned out that brother Jeff had legitimately done a number on Beau’s hand. “I sent him to hospital,” Jeff lamented, “Oh, it was terrible. We made one terrible error, we didn’t have an ‘out’ word, a safety word, you know”.
Amusingly, in Beau’s recollection to EW in 2014, there very much was a safe word, but the problem was that Jeff got so carried away with the intensity of the scene that he completely missed Beau yelling it while hollering in agony. “I knew Jeff was going to get freaked out, so I told him, ‘I want there to be a stop word, so if I say it, you know you’re hurting me’,” Beau explained, “I can’t remember what it was, but he ignored it totally. He didn’t stop.”
Jeff took playful issue with Beau making the injury sound worse than it was, grinning, “We did have to take him to the hospital,” but added, “I can’t remember if anything was broken or not. I don’t think I broke anything”, while the older simply waited for the director to yell ‘Cut!’ before politely excusing himself, recalling with a grimmace, “I thought he’d broken my hand”.
In the end, it’s hard not to think that the duo’s father, Lloyd, an iconic actor in his own right and the man who taught his sons how to stage fight, would probably have put the whole mess down to one age-old adage: boys will be boys.
