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"FacebookPinterest\n\n This winter, Jeff Bridges appears in a sequel and a remake. That should mean he's the embodiment of everything wrong with modern moviemaking. Except, of course, that the remake is the Coen brothers' True Grit (and technically a re-adaptation of the 1968 Charles Portis novel, not of the John Wayne film). And the sequel, Tron: Legacy, demonstrates such sweet, affectionate regard for one of the sillier chapters of the actor's own youth that it's all but irresistible. If this be the Death of Hollywood, save room in the hearse.\n\nThis nifty bit of cultural kung fu suits Bridges, whose career is filled with just such parados: He's the self-described \"lazy\" actor who's appeared in more than sixty films; the youthful sex symbol who grows more attractive with age; the Hollywood dauphin who still hangs on to an outlaw aura. All Zen puzzles upon which the Dude\u2014the role most emblematic of Bridges's fruitful late period\u2014might profitably groove while practicing his afternoon Tai Chi.\n\nThis is also the year in which Bridges finally won an Academy Award, for Crazy Heart, after four failed nominations stretching back to 1972. The award not only made official his status as Hollywood royalty but also seemed to recognize his role as our most laid-back Renaissance man: musician, photographer, keeper of one of the Web's loveliest oases (jeffbridges.com), and all-around dispenser of ungrizzled West Coast wisdom\u2014something with which he was characteristically generous while sitting down with GQ near his home in Santa Barbara.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nYou've lived up here since the Northridge earthquake in 1994. Were you hit by the quake?\n\n When they did a map of the fault line, we had our own private fault around our house in Santa Monica. I was asleep in bed\u2014I sleep naked\u2014and when it hit, it was like I went to war. I was like, \"Oh, we're being bombed. Perhaps an alien attack.\" Everything just... opened up. I'd been around earthquakes before, but this was just, like, the real thing.\n\nDid you learn anything about how you'd react if it was an alien invasion?\n\n I was made aware of how little I knew about where everything was\u2014how to turn the gas off, all that\u2014and how knowledgeable my wife, Sue, is. It's wonderful that she's the way she is, because I'm certainly the way I am. I go off and do the movies and music and stuff, and she manages our whole deal.\n\n Any lasting effects?\n\n Philosophically I really got in touch with how impermanent things are. When you think about it, you really count on things staying where they are. You count on stillness.\n\n It's interesting you say that. There's that famous Pauline Kael quote about you being \"the most natural and least self-conscious screen actor who ever lived.\"\n\n That's something I guess I aspire to\u2014a sort of stillness of the mind. You get to thinking so quickly and so loudly in your own head that you can't hear what the universe is saying. You want to calm that guy down a little bit. Not by forcing it not to talk. Not \"Shut the fuck up, Donnie!\" More like \"Please, shhh.\"\n\n And you can do that in the middle of all the artificial chaos of making a film?\n\n How can I describe it? You prepare. You do your due diligence, and then you come in and it's completely different. It's rainy when it's supposed to be sunny. The director's pissed off. The other actor's not doing it the way you imagined. It's like you're all set to do a Viennese waltz and you show up to find a cha-cha band. You can spend your energy getting pissed or you can fucking dance the cha-cha.\n\n As the son of a famous actor [Lloyd Bridges], how did you not end up a total disaster?\n\n I always chalk that up to my mother, though my father was more appreciative of my choice of roles. My mother didn't care for the Dude; she'd say, \"I don't want to have to see my boy smoking pot.\" Or something worse, like The Vanishing: \"Why do you feel you have to bury people in the ground alive? Why?\"\n\n Your career began in the most storied era in filmmaking, in Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show. Did you have a sense of being part of something special?\n\n Probably, if you asked me at the time. I remember having lunch with the cast. We were all pretty green. But I remember saying, \"This is something special happening here, isn't it?\"\n\nThe rumor is that you were involved with Cybill Shepherd on-set.\n\n Everybody was involved\u2014Everybody loves Cybill! Why not?\n\n Didn't that cause some tension, since Bogdanovich was in the process of leaving his wife for her?\n\n No, no. I had just come off of my first big love affair. My heart was very broken and tender and still hung up on that girl. I didn't invest emotionally. Now, Peter did.\n\nYou went straight from Bogdanovich to John Huston, on Fat City.\n\n Huston was great. My agent called and said, \"John Huston wants to meet with you.\" I said, \"Great. Where and when?\" He said, \"Well, it's Wednesday in Madrid. And he's going to give you a tour of the Prado.\" So I go to Madrid and I meet this beautiful girl in the lobby of the hotel. She says, \"Come on. I'll take you out.\" We go out and eat all this fish, and I wake up the next morning for my meeting with John thinking, I'm not feeling well, man....\n\n From a hangover or from the fish?\n\n I had terrible food poisoning! So now we're in the Prado, and he's showing me all the Goyas and Vel\u00E1zquezes, and I'm trying not to puke on these paintings. I'm literally puking in my mouth and swallowing my puke. At the end, he says, \"Nice to meet you. Very good, then,\" and leaves me there figuring I didn't get the part. Somehow I get back to the hotel. I'm puking my guts out, literally dying, and there's a knock on the door. I crawl over on my hands and knees, and who is it but James Mason, who looks down and says, [perfect James Mason impression] \"Jeffrey. Whatever are you doing on the floor?\" He and I had just spent three months in Hong Kong shooting a weird independent movie called The Yin and Yang of Mr. Go, where James played a Chinese-Mexican.\n\n As a young actor, did you ever imagine you'd do so many films that there would be some nobody even heard of?\n\n Well, I've been really fortunate, because my stance has always been to resist doing work.\n\n See, I've heard you say that\u2014that you're somehow lazy\u2014and I've got to call bullshit. You work a lot.\n\n But I do my best to resist. Because I am lazy. I don't like to engage. When I do, it's something I can't help. It's just too groovy of a thing.\n\n The evidence is that you engage frequently.\n\n Yeah. But here's the deal: If I look back on my filmography, I'm really digging it, man. I love all of my movies. I feel like I've got a beautiful bouquet of things I love.\n\n Are there any you regret?\n\n Some of them; it's like a red-light/green-light thing. Like, \"Yes... yes... no!\" I mean, like King Kong. They had a guy in a monkey suit and then this eighty-foot stiff thing, and they're supposed to be the same. I said, \"Oh God.\"\n\n It's a little strange that you haven't been in more sequels.\n\n I think the idea of sequels is a wonderful thing.\n\n Well, then, play a game with me. What would the sequels to some of your other films be like? Starman seems perfect for one.\n\n I actually messed around with what might happen there. I think my thing picked up right after the moment he goes up in the spaceship. He's been soiled in a way, too humanized. So they drop the body off, discard him, in some primitive, primeval forest in Washington State, naked. And while this is going on, Karen Allen is raising this kid who's got these abilities. It was pretty cool. I'd be up for that.\n\n I like it. And The Big Lebowski?\n\n Gosh, well, there's a baby. \"There's a little Lebowski on the way,\" as the Stranger says. Could be that Maude and the Dude have the baby. Maybe they have an open marriage because they both want the baby to be as cool as possible. And maybe it's their love story. How they fall in love late in their marriage. Does that kind of sound interesting? The kid would probably be very square.\n\n It's well-known many the Dude's clothes were taken from your wardrobe, but my favorite costume of yours is the awesome caftan in The Door in the Floor.\n\n That was mine! I wear that every morning.\n\n So it's sleep naked\u2014we've already established that\u2014and then into the caftan?\n\n It's actually called a djellaba. My wife bought it for me in Egypt.\n\n I think it's widely perceived that there's a fair amount of overlap between you and the Dude in more ways than just clothing.\n\n Yeah, certainly. I think I'm probably a little more ambitious than the Dude.\n\n Are you a pot smoker?\n\n I never turn down... Well, I suppose there are a few times I turn down a hit. But rarely.\n\n You've really embraced the cult that's built up around Lebowski.\n\n Yeah. But I try hard to shake it up. Shortly after the Dude, I played the president [in The Contender] and got nominated for an Academy Award. And the Crazy Heart guy isn't the Dude, and I got acknowledgment there. So the fact that the Dude is loved and stroked, it's beautiful. It's such a good movie! God!\n\n Is there a trick to playing high on-screen? Other than getting high?\n\n I've done it that way in the past and found it didn't work.\n\n It's hard to act while stoned?\n\n It's not so much the scene when you're stoned. It's the next scene, when you're not stoned. It just doesn't work.\n\n You're the only actor I've ever heard speak honestly about playing sex scenes. Does there have to be an actual intimate experience between you and an actress?\n\n There are so many ways to approach it. Some actors only want to relate when the camera is rolling. They only want you to call them by their character's name. That can be very effective. But then there's the other side, when you want to get to know the person on a more personal level. You don't want to fuck, but you want to share some real intimacy with them\u2014feelings about things, about your own personal life. It gives you more to work with. That's my method.\n\n Does being able to have these experiences actually save you from having real affairs?\n\n Probably so. My relationship with my wife is one of the most precious things in my life. We've been together for over thirty-three years, and to have a partner who encourages you to go out and do your stuff, which in my case means being away, being intimate with people... It gives me strength. She's holding the kite strings so I can go way out there.\n\n And yet you had to be dragged to the altar.\n\n I was terrified of losing my autonomy. Of not being able to go out and screw any girls I want. What I didn't know is that there are all these wonderful experiences that can only be had with that degree of intimacy. Isn't that kind of what the groove is? Isn't that the cool thing we're all looking for? Intimacy? Now, what that means is that things aren't always going to be happy and smooth, but it turns out the downs are really the blessings in a fun sort of way. And those other things, those things that give you the groovy pleasure feelings, those are really the traps you have to be careful for.\n\n How's that exactly?\n\n I'm into Buddhism a bit, and lately I've been working on the lojong teachings, the essence of which is that problems\u2014the tough things\u2014are kind of the keys to our prison cell. Somebody asked me, \"Is there a thread that runs through your movies?\" And I said, \"No, not really.\" But my recent thinking is it may be something like, the thing each character is afraid of turns out to be the key to his liberation.\n\n Would you say that you had a midlife crisis?\n\n I'm going through something right now. I don't experience it quite like a crisis\u2014more like a slow explosion\u2014but I noticed turning 60. Sixty, wow, man, that's close to 80! I'm closer to 80 than I am to 35. It's all coming down. So it's like, you know that cartoon where he's got the angel and the devil on his shoulder? One guy's saying, \"C'mon, man. If there's any shit you wanna do, you'd better do it now. 'Cause you're gonna die in a moment. It's gonna be over.\"\n\n Is that the angel or the devil?\n\n I can't figure out who he is. He's not particularly aggressive. He's just giving me the information. He's just saying. Meanwhile, on the other side, the guy is saying, \"Will you just fucking relax? You're going to spend the rest of your life doing a giant homework assignment?\" So I'm just trying to get the guys together on the same team. I think it's working out pretty well."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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