I’ve used the phrase “best actor never to win an Oscar” forfor so long that I figure I need a copyright on it. Started maybe as far back as Starman. Certainly by Fearless. Anyway, there’s a concerted effort, a vast Hollywood and off-Hollywood conspiracy, to get the man his Oscar. And I totally down with it. Below, an interview with him and a story I’ve written for publication later this week in the paper.
It’s coming together so cleverly it feels like a conspiracy, this movie Crazy Heart, that could have been tailor made to get Jeff Bridges his Oscar.
Bridges, who turned 60 in December, cackles at that.
Yes, Crazy Heart, which has Bridges playing a drunken has-been of a country singer, has already earned him a Golden Globe.
And yes, seems an awful lot like 1983’s Tender Mercies, which won an Oscar for Robert Duvall. Duvall was a producer on Crazy Heart, and took a supporting role.
“Robert Duvall is the GODfather of this movie,” Bridges admits, playing along. Writer-director “Scott Cooper had worked with Bob, and brought the script to Duvall first and Duvall loved it and he said ‘Let’s go!’”
Critics are saying things like, “Hand the Oscar to Jeff Bridges right now, and let’s be done with it.” (Steven Rea in The Philadelphia Inquirer). So this cunning scheme to get the actor the critic Pauline Kael once labeled “the most natural and least self-conscious actor that has ever lived” an Oscar is working, right?
“I’ll own up to that,” writer-director Scott Cooper admits. “I wrote it with Jeff in mind. I wouldn’t have made it without him. And I hope it gets him the Oscar.”
“There you go,” Bridges laughs. He’s in a damn fine mood, on his way to a special screening of the movie at the Jacobs Film Center in Pleasantville, New York. Whatever awards potential Crazy Heart has, he happily admits it’s a role he loved living in, a performance backed by personal history.
“Music’s been a big part of my life for years. Did a record a while back. I really dig country music. One of my oldest friends, John Goodwin — we go back to the fourth grade – he co-wrote the opening song, that ‘Hold on You’ song. He’s a Nashville songwriter and we’ve been writing music together for some while.
“Kris Kristofferson was one of the fellows I thought about for looking how to play Bad Blake (his character in the film). But my biggest role model was a fellow named Stephen Bruton, played with Kristofferson for years. He was a songwriter out of Austin, a guitar player who made these wonderful, sparse albums with Kris. He was my right hand man, with me every step of the way, teaching me the songs. The movie’s dedicated to him. We had a wonderful time, the last few months of his life, working on this together.”
The movie’s country music authenticity can be traced back to one of the most infamous flops in Hollywood history, a movie Bridges and Kristofferson and the musician/producer T-Bone Burnett met on – Heaven’s Gate.
“That was thirty years ago…Kristofferson brought all his musician friends along with him when we went up to — . We’d spend every night after work jamming.”
He was sure to get his musician friends involved when he made Crazy Heart. Bridges is nothing if not loyal. The son of actor Lloyd, brother of actor Beau, he’s kept a tight showbiz circle for almost 40 years. He’s had the same stunt-double and stand-in, Loyd Catlett, “for 60 movies, now.”
And he’s been dying for the chance to sing on the big screen. As anybody hearing his Waylon-by-way-of-Don-Williams growl in Crazy Heart will attest, Bridges has a country music voice.
“They were all damn good tunes, and damn fun to play. That ‘Hold on You,’ I just loved that. I loved that ‘Fallin’ and Flyin’’ song, a Stephen Bruton song. And Ryan Bingham wrote one called ‘The Weary Kind’ that sticks with me, too.”
In recent years, Bridges has popped up as a hippy New Age warrior (The Men Who Stare at Goats), a comic book villain (Iron Man) and a high-powered magazine publisher (How to Lose Friends and Alienate People). Though one of those was a hit, there’s been the sense that his was a career winding down with his leading man days are numbered. That 60th birthday was a reminder of that.
“I’m kind of enjoying being old and having all this attention this happen now,” he says. “The downside to it all is that your body’s kind of falling apart – aches and pains. But, you have a good spell, now and then, and I’m having one right now. A certain energy that I feel in the air.”
And he’s had his down stretches before. Huffington Post critic Jackie Cooper calls Bridges “the phoenix of Hollywood. Just when you think his career is down for the count he rises up in something like Crazy Heart and makes himself relevant again.”
The Jeff Bridges Oscar conspiracy may come to nothing. He’s been nominated before – four times in all. But he’s looking at the next stretch of his acting career with new purpose, he says. He’s done something he rarely does – a sequel, this one to the computer-game oriented thriller TRON. Tron Legacy opens this December. And he’s hunting around for that next indie project that tests him, puts him in a place he’s never been before.
“Perspective is a wonderful thing. And that birthday told me that ‘If you want to do your stuff, do it now.”
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