In a recent interview, a Hollywood director recalled the time that famed actor Jeff Bridges gave him a scare by getting high on marijuana right before filming a crucial scene as the president of the United States in the 2000 film The Contender—a performance for which Bridges was later nominated for an Academy Award.
Speaking at an event at the Clinton Presidential Center about the American presidency, director Rod Lurie was recounting a story about filming a key speech by the actor, who just years earlier had played the iconic stoner The Dude in the movie The Big Lebowski.
“At the end, Jeff Bridges is going to give a huge speech, right? Big speech, hundreds of people,” Lurie said, explaining that the production company had rented out the Virginia Statehouse for the day as a stand in for the U.S. Capitol and hired a sea of extras to play lawmakers.
The problem: “Jeff is in his trailer, and he won’t come out.”
After sending an intern an another assistant to check on the actor, Lurie said, eventually he knocked on Bridges’s trailer door himself.
“The door opens, and I was blown away by this huge cloud of marijuana,” the director said. “This thing blew me backwards.”
“I said, ‘Jeff, you’ve got a three page speech to give,’” Lurie said. “It’s funny watching him put on his costume. You know how a stoned person puts on clothes. And I’m going, ‘Oh my god, we’re so screwed. We’re dead. That’s my second movie. I’m never going to work again.’”
“Jeff is going, ‘Hey man!’” Lurie continued. “He says, ‘Have you had the cobbler at Emily Shaw’s Inn at Pound Ridge? Man, that food is so good.”
“I go, ‘Jeff, do you know your lines?’ He goes, ‘What lines?’” the director said. “And then we get to the room. He walks in and he sees it all. He goes, ‘Dude, there are a lot of people here.’”
While Lurie’s telling of the story made clear that the director was concerned Bridges’s cannabis use could derail the day of filming, things turned around from the moment he said “action.”
“And then—boom!—he completely changes,” Lurie said of Bridges’s performance. “Becomes super presidential. Gives the speech, nails it in one. Half a year later—’And the nominees are: Jeff Bridges in The Contender.’”
Bridges ultimately didn’t win the 2001 Oscar for best supporting actor, though he went on to win the best actor award for his role in the 2009 film Crazy Heart.
For his role as The Dude in The Big Lebowski, meanwhile, the actor has said in the past that he opted not to use marijuana at all.
“I’ll burn some herb occasionally, but for that film I decided, ‘This is such a wonderful script, and quite detailed,’” he told Yahoo in a 2014 interview. “While it seems very improvisational, it’s all scripted. It was all done exactly [as written]. If you add an extra ‘man’ in a spot, it didn’t quite feel right. So I really wanted to have all my wits about me. I didn’t burn at all during that movie.”
Bridges wasn’t the only actor that Lurie dished on during the Clinton Presidential Center event. He also described the late actor Peter Fonda as “a total hippie.”
“This guy was stoned every single day we shot,” the director said. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I don’t know what I’m gonna do.’”
Image element courtesy of Gage Skidmore.
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