Jeff Bridges

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
TETRAGRAMMATON TETRAGRAMMATON.

**Jeff Bridges** (0:24)
I'm like a lot of entertainers. My dad encouraged all his kids to go into showbiz.
And so when I was about eight years old, he'd say, hey, come on, you got to come to work with dad. You get to get out of school, make some bucks, buy some toys or whatever you want. Come on. I said, oh, okay. And so I looked at it as basically pretend. Remember being a kid and pretending. And so nowadays, it's like advanced pretend basically. You get into play with all the cool kids, you get the cool gear. That's basically what it is. And something else that hasn't changed is my anxiety about it all. You know, I'm always quite anxious, you know.

**Rick Rubin** (1:14)
What do you attribute that to?

**Jeff Bridges** (1:16)
Just the unknown. You know, you don't know what's going to happen, you know.

**Rick Rubin** (1:20)
But we never know.

**Jeff Bridges** (1:21)
You never know, man. And you know, but we have this imagination that we can jam, man, we can ruminate our asses off, man. And so, and that's what, you know, acting is all about that.
A story just popped into my head. We go string of consciousness.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:38)
Yeah, yeah. Always.

**Jeff Bridges** (1:39)
Yeah, yeah. So I'm about 16 years old, and I go with a bunch of my dear friends, and we go to my parents' beach house down here, and now it's time to leave. I'm turning out the lights, right, to leave them lock up. And that little feeling of fear of the dark. Remember that feeling, the fear of the dark? I said, what happens if I invite that in, and let it engulf me?
And boom, it drove me to my knees. I went fetal, man. I just was shaking like this.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:21)
When was this?

**Jeff Bridges** (2:22)
It was like when I was 16, you know.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:23)
Wow. So how many years?

**Jeff Bridges** (2:24)
I don't know. I'm 76 now, you know, so I don't know what year it was. And my friends came in and said, what's wrong? What's wrong? You okay? Yeah, man. Something amazing just happened. They said, what? I said, I can be afraid of anything I wouldn't be afraid of. Yeah.
It was really quite remarkable. And so that, you carry that into the acting too. But, you know, remember pretending, you know, when you were a kid, you know, the better you can, you know, the more real you can take the shot or the more real you can do anything, the better.
You know, there's a lot of different approaches to acting, but that's kind of my approach.

**Rick Rubin** (3:07)
Tell me about your dad.

**Jeff Bridges** (3:09)
Oh, well, like I said, my dad loved acting, man. You know, his father didn't want him to be in acting at all. You know, he wanted to study law or something like that, but my dad wanted to act. He became the head of the drama department in UCLA. This is, you know, in the 20s or early 30s. That's where he met my mom. And he just, you know, loved acting and struggled his ass off, went to New York, you know. And here's an interesting little tidbit. So this is like, I don't know what year, maybe 60
Meredith Wilson wanted my dad to be the music man because my dad sings.
And one of my earliest memories is Meredith Wilson and Rene Wilson, his wife, coming over to our house and playing the whole score to music. What a score.

**Rick Rubin** (4:13)
Yeah, amazing.

**Jeff Bridges** (4:14)
And one of my earliest memories is Meredith Wilson coming up to me as a kid and say, you got trouble right here in River City. You're doing that whole song to me as a kid. Wow.

**Rick Rubin** (4:25)
So cool.

**Jeff Bridges** (4:26)
And then Teague da Costa, the director wanted Robert Preston who just kicked ass in that role. I mean, he was remarkable. And my dad got sea hunt that same year. So it worked out well for him.
And then my acting career kind of took off. I was doing stuff in high school, different things. I had an agent and all of that. But I resisted acting quite a bit.

**Rick Rubin** (4:52)
Really?

**Jeff Bridges** (4:52)
Because I had other things I wanted to do, music, painting, art. I had a bunch of other stuff. And I didn't want to compete with my brother, who was a bow, who was also an actor, and my dad. I didn't like that whole, what's the word?

**Rick Rubin** (5:09)