As the Dude abiding in The Big Lebowski, Jeff Bridges bowls against the jumpsuit-clad antagonist, Jesus Quintana. When Jesus says, “We’re gonna fuck you up,” Bridges replies, “Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” It’s a line that boils down the nonchalant brawn of Bridges’s acting. As Kevin Flynn in Tron: Legacy, Bridges crystallized his Zen thing when he “knocked on the sky and listened to the sound.” Flynn made the grid, a digital frontier to reshape the human condition. And you believed he made it. Bridges is always believable. Whether he’s playing the good guy or the bad guy, he has the ability to meet his characters at their motivations, to understand their headspace, and to formulate his acting from there. Bridges has that aged sageness to him (a wisdom?), as seen in his Rooster Cogburn role from True Grit. But forget that, he made the motherfucking grid, where there are light-cycles—the coolest motherfucking things of all time. Bridges has been in 70 movies, winning an Academy Award for his 2009 role as country singer Bad Blake in Crazy Heart. Bridges’s singing voice is a molasses-coated tenor, flashing professional levels of grit and vibrato when he wants…
Jeff Bridges & the Abiders play Friday, November 21, at the Pantages Theater in Tacoma.
