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The post A Deep Conversation With Jeff Bridges appeared first on SPIN.";"A Deep Conversation With Jeff Bridges. On the other end of the phone
I heard the gravel-toned voice belonging to 72-year-old beloved
legendary actor
musician
and philanthropist Jeff Bridges. All it took was his “Good morning!” to conjure the image of him behind the wheel of a well-worn country pick-up truck
waving
as he ambles up my make-believe driveway toward my sprawling
somewhere-out-West front porch.
The truck bed
loaded with bushels of peaches. Or explosives. Or both. Bridges has been through the ringer the last two years. In October 2020
he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and then
after successful chemotherapy treatments
spent five weeks in the intensive care unit after a near-death bout with COVID-19. He eventually recovered and returned to work. He’s currently playing Dan Chase
an ex-CIA officer on the run
in FX’s seven-part limited series/political thriller
The Old Man — based on the namesake novel by Thomas Perry — airing on Hulu. The Old Man (co-starring another legend
John Lithgow) is Bridge’s first return to television since appearing in Sea Hunt (1958-1960)
with his late father
actor Lloyd Bridges
when he was eight years old. Yes
Bridges appeared in other TV series since then (who can forget him as Cal Baker in Lassie or Hawk in The Most Deadly Game )
but those were one-off episodes. In The Old Man
as he has done over his seven-decade career (his first screen appearance was a baby in the arms of actress Jane Greer in the 1951 drama The Company She Keeps )
Bridges earns our adoration by imbuing folksy Vermont widower Dan Chase (who is also the kind of man once known as “The Beast Who Eats Everything”) with breathtaking moment-to-moment authenticity. It’s why we love him: his nuanced work lays bare the inner lives of the men he inhabits and revelations about the human experience. In performances that range from small-town Texas football captain Duane Jackson
in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show
which garnered the then 21-year-old actor his first Oscar nomination
to his famous herb-induced “go with the flow
” Jeff Lebowski
aka The Dude in the Coen brothers’ film The Big Lebowski
and a host of thrillers
Westerns
buddy flicks
dramas
and dark comedies
between and after: think The Fisher King
Fearless
The Fabulous Baker Boys and True Grit
Bridges shows us that sometimes
we relish the fruit of our efforts. Other times
we find our world blown to smithereens. Advertisement. Advertisement. Advertisement. Advertisement. “Unlike a lot of parents in the entertainment business
mine encouraged me to go into acting
they loved it so much
” Bridges gushed about being raised in his Hollywood family with his mom
actress Dorothy Bridges
his dad
Lloyd
and older brother
actor Beau. “I wanted to do other things
but my dad said
‘Jeff
don’t be ridiculous. The wonderful thing about acting is that you have to call upon all your other interests ⎯ you’re going to have opportunities to do your music and your art.’ And I’m glad I followed his instructions because he was right. True that. In 2007
Bridges channeled his lifelong love of music into an Oscar-winning portrayal of washed-up
alcoholic country singer Otis “Bad” Blake in Crazy Heart . I had plans to talk about his relationship with longtime friend and producer T. Bone Burnett
who scored the haunting music for The Old Man
and his band Jeff Bridges and The Abiders. I also wanted to know more about his role over the last 12 years as the national spokesperson for Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign to end world hunger. I also wondered if he was ever mistaken for Jeff Daniels. I covered little to none of it. After “Good morning!” I asked Bridges what had “hooked” him about the character of Dan Chase. The themes of The Old Man became a leaping off point for a conversation about his spirituality
lessons the universe wants to teach us
humans as superorganisms
the Hubble telescope
truth
the secret to his 45-year marriage to Susan Geston
and love. Jeff Bridges was at the wheel
alright. And he was bringing me juicy morsels — and truth bombs — about life. This is what happens when dudes don’t abide. They die face down in the muck. Credit: Prashant Gupta/FX. SPIN: Your new series
The Old Man
resonated with me as a story about identity
and the internal truth of who we are
as much as it is about the roles we play
and the choices we make. What did you see in this character of Dan Chase that hooked you? Jeff Bridges: Well
it’s interesting that you bring up some of the themes of identity
that certainly intrigued me
as well as this idea of consequences. As far as the identity idea
I think our identity is quite a mystery: I don’t think we entirely understand ourselves or know who we are. And what we do has consequences — sometimes we think we’re making very righteous choices in our lives
and turns out that those were wrong choices. And vice versa. It is funny
and very mysterious. Advertisement. Advertisement. Advertisement. Advertisement. Can you share a bit more about the mysteries of who we are
and how that’s connected to your spiritual worldview? My spiritual path crosses a lot of different lines. I feel most alive
with kind of a Buddhist philosophy. In The Old Man
we were fortunate to have Christopher Huddleston
an actual CIA operative. We talked extensively about his personal philosophy
and he turned me on to stoicism. In deeper studying of it
the parallels with Buddhism
and some of my other spiritual explorations
I learned that they all relate to each other. With stoicism
my initial reading was a book called The Obstacle Is the Way [by Ryan Holiday] which reminds me of a lot of the Buddha’s teachings: leaning into what you think is the problem rather than trying to avoid it. Lean into that
and that’s your next spiritual class
so to speak. I’m quite interested in a phrase called emergent behavior — it relates to a system
like a murmuration of birds
or fish schools. They make their shape in a collective way
almost like a superorganism. But we are a superorganism. Each individual is part of this human superorganism. Bucky Fuller
the guy who invented the geodesic dome
made an interesting observation about ocean-going tankers
and what a challenge the engineers had in creating these huge ships. A big rudder was going to turn these ships
and they found that it took too much energy. So
they came up with a wonderful solution by creating a trim tab
a very little rudder on the big rudder — the little rudder turns the big rudder
and then the big rudder turns the ship. Bucky made a beautiful metaphor for how individuals affect our culture and our society
that we’re all in fact trim tabs. We affect what this superorganism is going to be. And it’s kind of mysterious. Follow your heart
you know
whatever it is
but there’s so many different hearts. And the truth becomes so subjective that one we’re not really aware of the actual truth. I read a phrase the other day that struck home — ”the truth is oneness
everything else is facts.” And I’m also fascinated with the Hubble telescope and looking to space — we’re very close to looking back to when the Big Bang happened. And I was seeing these photographs and noticed these huge galaxies looked like they’re spinning clockwise
and some are counterclockwise. And I said
what’s that about? So
I googled that
and the simple answer I got was this: It depends on where you are looking at it. You’re on one side looking at it and it looks like it’s spinning clockwise. On the other side
it’s counterclockwise. Those are facts. But it’s not the truth. <p>Jeff Bridges as Dan Chase in The Old Man
the real attack dog in the show.
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