It's been nearly two decades since The Big Lebowski, a tale about an emphatically nonchalant man named Jeffrey “the Dude” Lebowski who gets forced over the precipice of chalance, transformed Jeff “the actor” Bridges into an unwitting pop cult leader. The fates of the Dude and the film have a pleasing symmetry: Both were underachievers enjoying blithe existences until a startling catalyst (a case of mistaken identity; an avalanche of VHS sales) ripped them from their middling courses and set them on paths only someone ingesting hallucinogens could have predicted. For the Dude, it was a path of botched kidnappings, severed toes, and Germans. For the movie, it was Lebowski-themed fan festivals, a Dude-inspired religion (Dudeism), and the Library of Congress's National Film Registry.
Jeff Bridges isn't turned off by this, as some already famous actors might be—by the fanatical, undying popularity of a weird thing he did once, back in 1998, that no one has ever forgotten, that people quote at him ad nauseam. He's too imperturbable, too Dude for that. Bridges is famously cool with the weighty Lebowski legacy. It's obvious why within moments of meeting him. He's the kind of guy who will muse dreamily over lunch, “I like a lot of that Buddhist stuff,” in a way that could be devoid of any meaning—who among us would object to a lot of that Buddhist stuff?—but then follow it up by outlining the historic trajectory of Chinese Ch'an to Japanese Zen and asking things like “Have you heard of Pema Chödrön?”
While he awaits the arrival of his Virgin Mary mocktail, his plate of raw oysters, and his other plate of raw clams, Bridges draws me a picture of his labyrinth. It's mowed into the grass on his property in Santa Barbara, and it really ties the yard together. “The idea is, it's a walking meditation,” he explains, when I ask what a man might do with a labyrinth. “Sometimes I'll do it in a dance,” he clarifies. “Sometimes I'll do it for Easter,” he opposite-of-clarifies.
He's leaning over a pocket-size notebook and drawing the same geometric pattern over and over. “With a maze, you've got to make all these choices about which way to go, and some are dead ends, some aren't.” But a labyrinth is different, he explains. “With the labyrinth, the only choice is to go in or not.” I ask him about the origins of the pattern. A mathematical symbol copied from nature? Aliens? Jeff Bridges is not sure.
“I think it's one of those things like pyramids, you know?” he replies, still drawing. His voice is throaty and warm, like Santa Claus's, if he were thoughtfully eating a toffee. “They just showed up all over the place.”
We've met for a meal in the airy restaurant of a Santa Monica hotel—so airy, in fact, that there is a small brown bird flying around inside of it attempting to find its way back out to the open ocean but perhaps confused by the dining room's beachy color scheme. Bridges's color scheme is the friendly gray of a small passing cloud that threatens no rain. His metal spectacles are gray; the image of Bob Dylan on his T-shirt is gray. Bridges will be 68 in December, but his gray hair remains as leonine as a pewter door knocker.
I look back down at Bridges's finished drawing, a scheme of right angles and concentric curving lines.
So you really have this mowed into your lawn?
“I have it mowed into my lawn.”
Did you mow it yourself?
“Yeah!”
His tone is the one you'd use if someone presented you with a litany of hyper-specific questions about how to make a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. You just mow an ancient Native American cosmology symbol into your yard, and then you walk around in it and meditate whenever you want.
Bridges knows he'll probably be remembered best for padding around grungy '90s Los Angeles in a cozy sweater that hugged him like the fur of a hibernating bear, but prior to that his career followed a serpentine path—from boy wonder (The Last Picture Show), to brilliant engineer who accidentally becomes a video game (Tron), to alien heartthrob (Starman), to disgraced radio shock jock palling around with schizophrenic Robin Williams (The Fisher King)—yet somehow he always seemed headed in the right direction. Then, at some point post-Lebowski, Bridges evolved into the Marlon Brando of grizzled American West prospector types. His last three Academy Award nominations—for 2009's Crazy Heart (he won best actor), 2010's True Grit, and last year's Hell or High Water—have all saluted his portrayal of rugged backcountry men. This fall, he'll star in Only the Brave, a wildfire drama inspired by real events, as the retired chief of an Arizona fire department, and you'd better believe he wears a cowboy hat. And in Kingsman: The Golden Circle, the sequel to the 2014 British spy caper, he plays the head of a secret society based near the heart of Appalachia—Kentucky specifically, which is basically the West, except instead of hunting, they go a-hunting.
“Beautiful state,” Bridges says with a wistful squint, the beauty of Kentucky so radiant, even in a memory, that it pains him to look at it head-on. “Very green. A lot of horses.”
Just two months ago, he and his wife of 40 years, Susan, went for the Derby. “I got to say, ‘Riders up!’ ” he says with delight. “Very exciting. Get to wear a hat! How often do you get to wear wild hats?” (The answer, if you're Jeff Bridges, is all the time, of course, as a professional film actor. The funny thing is, Jeff Bridges didn't even wear a hat to the Derby. Susan did—a diaphanous dove gray chapeau. Bridges's glee appears to stem not just from wearing wild hats but also from being in their intoxicating presence.)
Before the race, Bridges tells me, he decided on a whim to bet on a horse whose name he liked: Always Dreaming. It came in first. In carefree Dude fashion, he can't remember exactly how much he won, but he estimates it was about $500. The thrill of winning is surpassed in his recollection by the adrenaline rush of the wild hats.
The Kingsman movies are shamelessly, indulgently violent and often employ technology so advanced it hasn't even received VC funding yet. Their sleek aesthetic wouldn't seem to jibe with Bridges's dusty (in a good way), sun-bleached recent work. But he tells me he was a fan of the surprise-hit original.
“I thought it was probably the best James Bond–type movie in that genre,” he says. And, as he proved with Lebowski, he's not one to shy away from a madcap adventure. “They're the kind of movies that I like to be involved in and also the kind of movies that I like to just see, where the filmmakers are a little ahead of me. You don't know quite what's going to happen.” So, Bridges says, he was “pleasantly surprised” when Matthew Vaughn, who also directed the original, offered him a part in the sequel.
Bridges settles so easily into the saddles of many hardscrabble cowboys that it's easy to forget he isn't one—not even remotely. He grew up on the borders of Bel Air and Beverly Hills in the affluent neighborhood of Holmby Hills, the son of two actors. At the same time, to paint him as a golden surfer boy at the center of Hollywood is to ignore the litany of weird, dark roles he has taken at the margins, like the meticulous killer in The Vanishing. He was nominated for an Academy Award at 67, but also at 22, and five times in between. To call him beloved is accurate, and a compliment, but it discounts his ability to surprise. He's someone audiences never get tired of running into.
Lucky, then, that after half a century of making movies, Jeff Bridges doesn't seem exhausted. If anything, he seems extremely well rested. Once he's completed his errands for the day—talking to me, taking a field trip to a nearby artist community, checking out a socially conscious grab-and-go restaurant that he hazily half-invites me to, though he has no idea when he will be there—Bridges can return to his lawn and dance slowly through the labyrinth he himself sheared into the grass. Getting lost seems relaxing for him. Maybe we should all do it.
Caity Weaver is a GQ writer and editor.
This story originally appeared in the October 2017 issue with the title “The Sweater Abides.”