There are few actors who are quite as reliable and immediately engaging as Jeff Bridges. It's easy enough to accuse him of simply playing the same character type every time - a lovable, gruff older man with a wry sense of humor - but I've never seen him not put a craftsman's twist on any single character he's played thus far. His characters in True Grit and Crazy Heart are similar enough - an alcoholic bounty hunter working and bonding with a young woman vs an alcoholic folk singer bonding with a single mother and her son. The difference in his approach to these two characters is evident immediately in either film, and not just because of the difference in the eras that those films are set in.
Bridges has a reputation now as the voice of pickled wisdom, and that goes back to his titular Buddha-like hero in the Coen brothers' beloved The Big Lebowski, which remains a great movie despite spawning a legion of obnoxious die-hards. So, when he commented on the idea of a sequel to The Big Lebowski, as Variety reports, his words carried a certain kind of weight. That was the case during a recent press event for Hell or High Water, the new neo-Western that he stars in alongside Chris Pine and Ben Foster, when he was asked about his opinion of John Turturro's plan to make a movie about Jesus, his character in The Big Lebowski. Bridges said that Turturro's story was a "great idea," and that he would love to make a cameo in the film, but he also added his own idea for a sequel, one that centers on the "little Lebowski" that Sam Elliott's The Stranger speaks of at the end of the film. Here's the exact quote:
“I’m hoping they make a little Lebowski [sequel] because it’s all set up...I impregnated Maude. As The Stranger says, ‘There’s a little Lebowski on the way,’ you know?”
I'll be the first one to say that most movies about a son continuing on a legacy of the father in film are almost always a bad idea, but this one could work. Of course, lord knows if any of this will happen, considering the legal circus that Turturro walked into when he investigated if he could make a Jesus movie, but it's fun to dream and if The Dude himself abides, I'm willing to hold out hope.
