Oscar-winning actor Jeff Bridges has had a long and storied career of taking interesting roles that showcased his range, whether embodying a broken Venice beach stoner in The Big Lebowski, small town Texas loser Duane Jackson in The Last Picture Show, or holding his own with screen legend Clint Eastwood in the seminal 1974 action comedy Thunderbolt & Lightning. But for a new generation of cineastes, he will forever be remembered as in the immortal role of villain Obadiah Stane in the inaugural Marvel film, Iron Man.
Looking back on his career playing support to Robert Downey, Jr., in a comic book movie made for children, Bridges revealed to Vanity Fair how terrible the script for Iron Man was, how much work the cast put into improving it during rehearsals, and how confused they were when the studio threw out all of their dialogue improvements in favor of the original bad script.
“It was Marvel’s first adventure into making movies. It was so lucky to have Jon on there and [Robert] Downey, because both of them are terrific improvisers, and we spent a couple of weeks working on the script and rehearsing together, because we didn’t like the original script and we thought, ‘Oh yeah, we fixed this, fixed that.’
Then came the first day of shooting, and Marvel kind of threw out our script that we had been working on, said, ‘No, that’s no good. It’s got to be this and that,’” Bridges continued. “And so there was a lot of confusion about what our script was, what we were gonna say. We’d spend hours in one of our trailers going over lines and exploring how we were going to do it.”
Luckily, Bridges was able to get some perspective on the film,and remembered that it wasn’t really going to be very good and that he should probably just have fun enjoy the process. With that fresh, positive attitude, he was able to go into it with a more relaxed mindset:
“It drove me absolutely crazy until I made a slight adjustment in my brain that was, ‘Jeff, just relax. You’re making a $200 million student film. Just relax and have fun,’” Bridges said. “And that kind of did the trick because here I get to play with these two incredible artists and just jam, and that’s what we ended up doing.”