The Dude Speaks

Jeff Bridges is as cool as you think he is.

Since Oscar somehow hasn’t managed to award him yet, we thought we’d call Jeff Bridges to tell him that, as far as this city’s concerned, he’s already the best actor. The man has appeared in four films made here—and in a fifth, the Coen brothers’ cult classic The Big Lebowski, he plays a character (the Dude) based on Jeff Dowd, a member of the early-’70s political activists who became known as the Seattle Seven. When we spoke with Bridges, he’d just been in town to introduce a screening of Lebowski at Dale Chihuly’s birthday party. He gave us his thoughts on his Seattle cinema efforts.

The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989)

Though it can’t compete with the sight of Michelle Pfeiffer crooning “Makin’ Whoopee” atop a very lucky piano in LA’s Biltmore Hotel, Seattle looks glamorously downbeat as the wet neon backdrop for Jeff and big brother Beau Bridges’s waning lounge act. The younger Bridges explains the technical reason why he looks so damn good tickling the ivories: “I am a musician, but I’m nowhere near the musician that Dave Grusin is. We videotaped Dave playing all the music that I’d be playing. I practiced those parts and then when we got to the day of shooting, we deadened the piano so it wouldn’t play. We played Grusin’s thing, and I was playing the notes that Grusin was playing so it looked like I was actually playing it. I mean, I was playing it, but that’s not what you were hearing, you know what I’m sayin’? I think we did that pretty well.”

American Heart (1993)

Director Martin Bell took his documentary Streetwise as inspiration for this uneven but emotionally well-observed drama in which Bridges, fresh out of prison, begrudgingly bonds with teenage son Edward Furlong while struggling to survive on a fairly squalid block of Summit Avenue on Capitol Hill. Bridges, in one of his best performances, looks and sounds like somebody you don’t mess with: “I worked out with some ex-cons, guys who knew how to get their bodies in shape because they had to be in shape in prison. And I got a lot of advice from Eddie Bunker, the guy who wrote the book for Straight Time, that Dustin Hoffman film—just stuff about how I’d talk to a parole officer or a cop. Having him around was a huge help. He was there during rehearsal. He was a real touchstone for me.”

The Vanishing (1993)

Kiefer Sutherland obsesses over the disappearance of girlfriend Sandra Bullock until her abductor tracks him down. Director George Sluizer remade his own 1988 Dutch/French success Spoorloos; the new film cops out where the original left you rattled. Bridges, however, deftly turns his shaggy charm into pathology as Barney, the game-playing psycho who cruises Pike Place Market for potential victims. He tops it off with a genuinely weird way of talking: “George Sluizer had me make up a personal history for the character. I sort of figured his persona and his accent would be contrived. And right around the same time George came up to me and said, in his own accent, ‘ I’m the real Barney, Jeff.’ So I loosely based it on George’s accent. And I don’t think he ever mentioned anything about, you know, doing less accent or more accent. I don’t think he even thought of it as an accent.”

Big City Dick (2004)

Bridges’s father Lloyd starred in a late-1950s TV show called Sea Hunt—which just happens to be among the many obsessions of Richard Peterson, the autistic savant whose decades as a Seattle street musician are covered in this consistently surprising and laudably unsentimental documentary. Bridges appears in the film to recount the story of his first of many encounters with Peterson, whom he met while in town filming American Heart. It’s also one of his favorite ­Seattle memories: “I was getting ready for work when I hear this trumpet note. And the music started to sound kind of familiar. So I look out the window and there’s this guy playing the sound cues from Sea Hunt. I go outside and he wants to embrace me so, you know, I give him a hug. And he goes, ‘Son of Sea Hunt! Son of Sea Hunt!’ And every time I saw Richard after that we went through the exact same meeting every single time.”

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Published: December 2009