'This technology means I'd never have to work again in my life and I could still make films': Jeff Bridges returns in Tron



It's the sort of plot Hollywood's been banging on about for years... but now it's suddenly become real: technology that takes 30 years off an actor. As Jeff Bridges reveals what it's like to be given back his youth in the new Tron movie, we can all reflect: why not Sean Connery for the next 007?

I can play someone at any age. It's the beginning of a new era of film-making,' said Jeff Bridges on the sequel to Tron

I’m a pretty lazy guy,’ Jeff Bridges announces.

‘I spend most of my time avoiding work. Honestly, I do my best to turn everything down...’



His drive to make movies has been replaced by a desire to stay at home with Susan, his wife of 33 years, play the guitar, listen to country music and indulge his passions for photography and ceramics at their 20-acre ranch in Santa Barbara, California.

The irony is that the few roles Bridges accepts invariably result in exceptional performances. He won this year’s Best Actor Oscar for his poignant portrayal of the gruff, dissipated country-music star Bad Blake in Crazy Heart, and at 60 he’s more in demand than ever.

‘The more I say no the more great roles I get offered. But I know the effort it takes once you engage and commit. Also, it takes me away from my sweetheart, my leading lady. My wife tells me we’ve been apart 11 months this past year because of movies.’

Bridges’ latest film is an epic: Disney’s futuristic $300 million sci-fi sequel Tron: Legacy, out on December 17. He stars as video-game visionary Kevin Flynn, a character he first played almost 30 years ago.



The original Tron, released in 1982, sees computer hacker Flynn being abducted into the world of a computer and forced to participate in gladiatorial games. Tron: Legacy follows Flynn’s son, who gets sucked into the digital universe and discovers his long-lost father trapped by his father’s best ever creation, the Machiavellian program Clu 2 (a digital version of Bridges in his thirties).

‘He’s the first actor in cinematic history to play opposite a younger version of himself,’ says visual-effects supervisor Eric Barba.

New technology enabled film-makers to record the star’s facial movements in minute detail and then superimpose them onto a digital model of his younger self.



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‘This opens up the way for tales that couldn’t have been told before,’ says Barba.

For Bridges, the development marks a new epoch in cinema.

‘Whenever I see a big, epic film where the character has aged from being a boy to an old man, traditionally there are different actors playing him and there’s always a little bump for me when they change from one actor to the next. But now I can play someone at any age. It’s the beginning of a new era of film-making.

‘This technology means I’d never have to work again in my life and I could still make films. I can say, “I’ll lease you my image.” In a few years they’ll be able to take aspects of three different actors and make a fourth character. It’s getting weird. They can say, “Let’s put Bridges in here, but I want a little Al Pacino in there – what the heck. Let’s see what kind of guy we come up with.” I think they’ll have this ability to go, “We’re going to give you lots of money; you just come in and do all your expressions, be real, sad, happy… and that’s it.”’

Is he joking?



‘No, this is where movies are starting to go now. They’re taking the actors and putting them in a computer, very much like Tron. It’s got to the stage where we’re close to not having to work at all.’

We’re meeting at Digital Domain, close to Venice Beach in LA, the special-effects studio where Bridges has been recording expressions for the younger version of himself. There’s an almost empty glass of red wine on the table and a jug of water with two glasses (the Disney team have warned me that the eco-conscious actor loathes plastic bottles).



Close up, Bridges looks rugged and healthy, wearing a casual, untucked denim shirt, jeans and boots; the blond Californian good looks have matured. Was it strange seeing the younger version of himself?



‘Not too much, because I see myself a lot in my old movies. My wife was very critical of the digital image at first. She was honing in on the features of my face that she knows so well, but in the end she thought they did a pretty good job.’

Jeff stars as video-game visionary Kevin Flynn, a character he first played almost 30 years ago

He is a tactile man, grabbing my hand a lot when making a point. He has nothing left to prove in his career: there have been five Oscar nominations, beginning with The Last Picture Show, made when he was just 21.



Later work includes The Fabulous Baker Boys with his brother Beau, and more recently Iron Man. For an actor who professes to be driven by a desire to avoid work, Bridges has a remarkable knack for making good films.

It doesn’t take a psychologist to see that the roots of his ambivalence towards acting lie in his childhood. Bridges comes from Hollywood aristocracy. He was raised in LA with Beau (eight years older) and his sister Lucinda (five years younger) by their celebrity parents, Dorothy and Lloyd Bridges (famous for roles in High Noon and Airplane!). Unusually for an acting dynasty, theirs was a settled environment.



‘My mother and my father were amazing and I was incredibly lucky to be born in that particular bed. They gave me a really cool foundation in life. They were both very nurturing and wonderful examples of how to live life.’

The only negative aspect of his childhood was a pressure to follow his father into acting.



‘It put me off for a while. He didn’t do it for vicarious reasons, but because he enjoyed it so much,’ says Bridges, who preferred music.



‘He would say, “There’s a part here for a little kid; you want to be in it?” I’d say, “I don’t know…” And he would say, “You’ll get out of school, you’ll get to make some money and buy some toys.” So I said, “OK.” But like most kids I didn’t want to do what my dad did. When you’re a kid you don’t want to stand out. You don’t want people saying, “Oh, you think you’re so great because your dad is Lloyd Bridges.” You don’t want to be a product of nepotism, which I surely was.’

I point out the obvious – his consummate talent. He shrugs.



‘The reason I got my foot in the door was because of who my dad was – it’s as simple as that.’

When he finally decided that acting might be a decent career, he found an enthusiastic teacher in his father.



Olivia Wilde as Quorra in Tron: Legacy

‘He taught me the nuts and bolts, the basics. But the biggest thing I learned from him was the way he enjoyed it so much. Whenever he got on the set it was contagious; it was the funniest thing…’ Bridges tails off, looking emotional.



‘He approached his work with such joy. In the end I’m glad I took my dad’s advice and went into showbiz, because I love it now.’



Bridges made two films with his father, Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), and Blown Away (1994).

In the Sixties his brother Beau acted as a surrogate father when Lloyd was away on location.



‘My brother kicked in a lot, so I never felt I missed out. He wasn’t strict, but he did a lot of the father stuff. He was very athletic and taught me all the sports, like basketball, and we used to surf all the time.’

Beau also became a highly effective, if unorthodox, acting coach.



‘When I was 16 I was trying to get an agent and Beau came up with this wonderful idea to help me learn to act. We would rent a flatbed truck, and go into a supermarket and stage a fight and people would come around. When we got the right amount of people, we’d say, “No, it’s a show; we’re kidding”, and we’d jump in the back of this truck and do scenes that we’d prepared. Then inevitably the police would come and we would always try to incorporate the police into our routine, which really annoyed them. And then just before they would arrest us we’d say, “OK, we’re leaving”, and we’d go to the next supermarket and repeat it – we’d play the supermarket circuit. It was wild.’

They didn’t know who your dad was?

‘No,’ he grins.

The acting sessions were put to good use in 1989, when the Bridges brothers starred together as a piano-playing duo in The Fabulous Baker Boys.



The older Jeff in Disney's futuristic $300 million sci-fi sequel Tron: Legacy

‘I had such a good time in that movie, but I put Beau in hospital during our fight sequence,’ he smiles.



‘One of the most important things in acting is to have a safe word if you’re supposed to be hurting each other, like “strawberries”, as a code for “stop”. So we’re having this fight and I’m bending his hand back…’



He grabs my hand hard to demonstrate. ‘I’m screwing with his fingers like this and he goes, “Aaah, you’re hurting me – stop, stop…” I’m thinking, “Act your ass off – good, good”, because he didn’t use the safe word, and I ended up really hurting him.’

Bridges and his brother have always been close, he says, when we meet a second time for drinks in a hotel on the beach close to his house in Santa Barbara, just before the release of Tron: Legacy.



‘When I was eight or nine we struck it rich, as my dad got the job on (TV series) Sea Hunt and we moved to Holmby Hills (close to Beverly Hills). I remember my dad saying, “Do you guys want a swimming pool or a beach house?” We said, “Beach house.” The new beach house was very basic, but we’d spend all summer there, three months at a time. It was a family gathering spot; if anyone was having a party we’d go down there.’

During the Sixties, parties and gatherings revolved around music.

‘We were into the Beatles and Motown, James Brown and Bob Dylan. Every Wednesday night a group of guys would meet at my friend Steve Bain’s house. No songs were allowed – in other words, no songs that had been written down – but everybody was encouraged to improvise. We would just jam, play music – we had the saxophone hanging down from the ceiling from a piano wire and everybody would play it. Waaaaa…’

Garrett Hedlund, who plays Jeff's son in the new movie, on an iconic Light Cycle

Bridges mimics the sound of the instrument.



‘I played drums, guitar, piano, sax, whatever. Even as I tell you about it I’m thinking I’m going to call the guys and have another Wednesday-night jam.’

The parties were ‘wild’, he says. How wild? Bridges gives me a knowing look.

‘You can imagine,’ he says. ‘Beer, cigarettes. I was doing all the stuff that you probably did too when you were a teenager: getting drunk, doing pot, experimenting… although I never took heroin or anything like that – just all the stuff that was going around in the Sixties. It was an innocent time.

The original Tron was released in 1982

‘Sometimes my parents didn’t even know about me going to the beach house; they didn’t know where I was. It was interesting – in those days I did my rebelling, but parents weren’t as hip as they are today; they didn’t know about all the drugs, so you could get away with a lot more. And I thank my lucky stars that I made it through. I’m thankful I survived. It was dangerous stuff. Forget the drugs – getting drunk was terribly dangerous.’

Bridges and his wife have three daughters, Isabelle, 29, Jessica, 27, and Hayley, 25, and I wonder whether he worried about them when they were younger.

‘My kids aren’t interested in drugs,’ he says. ‘What’s nice is that with the next generation, kids rebel the other way.



'My daughters have always been very sensible. They say it’s dangerous to do drugs. I think that’s smart. I’m happy that they weren’t as unaware of the dangers as I was.’



A stable home life could also account for his daughters’ more conservative lifestyle. Like his parents, Bridges has had a long and, by Hollywood standards, unusually happy marriage.

He pulls two photos out of his wallet, one taken this year, the other a faded picture of a beautiful dark-haired girl with black eyes. They’re both of his wife, and he proceeds to tell me about the day he met Susan Geston in Montana on the set of Rancho Deluxe in 1977. She was working locally as a waitress.

‘It was love at first sight. I noticed a gorgeous girl who had two black eyes and a broken nose – she’d been in a car crash. Somehow the bruises juxtaposed with that beauty were amazing. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.



Jeff as 'The Dude' with Steve Buscemi and John Goodman in the Coen brothers' classic The Big Lebowski

'Finally, I get up my courage to ask her out and she says, “No. It’s a small town – maybe I’ll see you around.” Two days later, we met in a bar and fell in love. Now we cut to 15 years after that; I’m at my desk opening up mail and I get a letter and photo from the make-up guy on that film, who’d found a photo he took of me asking a local girl out. And now I have a picture of me speaking the first words to my wife.’

Acting, he says, remains enjoyable as long as he doesn’t do it all the time.



‘I loved The Fabulous Baker Boys with my brother Beau and Michelle Pfeiffer. The Big Lebowski was great, working with the Coen brothers. But it gets boring doing one thing – I get restless when I’m acting all the time, I get tired of myself.



'I always wanted to be a painter or a musician. Most of the time that’s what I’d rather be doing. I’d like to direct a film someday; that might be fun. But I know the hard work it takes and I don’t know if I’m willing to do that.’

He will be working next year, though – Bridges says much of 2011 will be devoted to charity work. He’s also in the process of making a country album with his Crazy Heart collaborator T Bone Burnett.

And wherever else 2011 is going to take him, Bridges looks set for a sixth Oscar nomination for his next role – in the Coen brothers’ remake of the classic western True Grit.



Not bad for an actor who’d rather be at home, or playing the guitar and singing country ballads.





