IRON MAN: JEFF BRIDGES

NEW YORK --The Continuum continues a series of interviews from last weekend's Iron Man press junket with Jeff Bridges, who plays Obadiah Stane.

Following is an edited transcription from the roundtable interview:

Question: When Jon Favreau got you for this, did he tell you to shave your head and grow a beard?

Bridges:No, no. As a matter of fact, when I saw the comic book, I went, "Oh, so I get to shave my head." The guy's bald. And I talked to Jon about it and I said, "Of course, I'll shave my head." And he said, "You don't have to do that. We don't have to prisoner to the comic book, but it's up to you."

I got excited about it. Then all of the anxiety I had when I was a kid getting my hair cut surfaced. It took me a while.

Question: What happened when you for roles afterwards? Did you have to wear wigs?

Bridges: My hair grows back pretty damn fast. I've had several haircuts since then, actually.

Question:It makes you equally sinister and sexy.

Bridges: Thank you. I liked it, too. I loved it. I can't recommend it highliy enough. I think it's a wonderful thing to do.

Question: This is a new kind of film for you. What was it about it that appealed to you?

Bridges: Jon Favreau was the real appeal to me. A big fan of his from Swingers. And the combination of Jon doing this comic-book genre film seemed so intriguing to me, I wanted to hear his pitch. Then he told me that Robert was going to be Iron Man, and that made it all the more wonderfully odd. I thought, "Oh God, this could be really exciting and different." That's what got me to the part.

Question: Even as he is being evil and fighting Iron Man, he never stops being sort of a father figure. What is like playing that sort of villain?

Bridges: I think there are aspects of good and evil in all of us. I think it's evil being self-servicing. But when you get into those higher stratospheres of that kind of thinking, yourself becomes everybody. It's a psychopathic kind of deal where Obadiah considers himself a hero. He's the guy who says, "Yeah, I'll be the bad guy. You can all blame me. Maybe you don't know, but I certainly know, that I'm holding this thing all together. What I'm doing may seem terrible, but this is why you can get your burgers at the fast-food chain, drive your hot cars and all that. I'm holding the status quo all together."

I think he thinks of himself in those terms.

Question: How do you portray the good and evil?

Bridges: One of the things that I like about this movie is that it's not ramming a message down your throat, whether it's a war movie or an anti-war movie. Hopefully, it will provoke a lot of discussion after this film about those themes, and about power and once you have it, what do you do with it. What are you willing to do to keep things the way they are? All of these kind of things that really pertain as to what is going on today.

Question: Do you have certain mechanics you employ to do that?

Bridges: I don't approach a protagonist or antagonist differently, really. I prepare for those roles in the same way. There becomes kind of a reality, that each movie or each story has and you want to stay in that. You don't want to rip that fabric. You want to stay in that.

That's one of the things that appealed to me about this movie, that it didn't have a strong message it war shoving down your throat, but it was tickling all these interesting themes and ideas.

Question: Does your character survive at the end?

Bridges: We don't know that.

Question: Could you be back for another film or two?

Bridges: Maybe. I don't know. They haven't asked me.

Question: Did they sign you up for three movies, like everyone else?

Bridges: No, no. It's all up in the air.

Question: Can you talk about the imrpovisation that Jon encouraged? How was it working off Robert Downey Jr.?

Bridges: We had great writers on the show, and we had a script that was constantly changing because there was so many higher-up elements that had to be approved. There was a lot of uncertainty about that.

Which kind of drove me crazy in the beginning because I like to be as prepared as I can. When you read the script, what you say about other people and other people say about you, that's how you form your character. And if that's all up for grabs...you kind of panic.

Often we would show up for work not knowing what we were going to say for that day. We'd go into Jon's trailer for a couple of hours with one of these little tape recorders and we would jam. We would play each other's characters, we'd all have ideas and we threw them around. We'd tried to distill it. The writers would be in the room with us, too, and the producers from Marvel would be there, throwing in ideas.

It took me a while to get behind that. For a few weeks, I was kind of panicking. It really rubbed my fur the wrong way. It's not how I like to work.

However, that's what it is. Life's like that, too. There are certain ways you like it, and it's rarely that way. That's how it is. It's like you're going to a ballroom all prepared to waltz and they're just playing cha-cha -- all night long. Now, you can spend time bitching about it. I finally got my cha-cha shoes out and began having fun playing the game the way it was being played...

Once I got with the program, it was kind of fun. And the fact that Jon Favreau is a wonderful actor hiimself and knows how different actors approach the material, he tried to give us all what we needed and was calm and allowed the way it was to turn into this terrific movie.