Jeff Bridges Is Ready For the Next Picture Show – and The Dude

It may never be the last picture show for Jeff Bridges.

The Academy Award-winner has an enduring fondness for several of the characters he’s played over the course of his long career. He’s already revisited the role of Kevin Flynn he originated in 1982’s “Tron” (as well as his digital doppelganger Clu) for the soon-to-bow sequel “Tron: Legacy,” and Bridges tells PopcornBiz he wants to reprise the role that first made Hollywood take notice of him: Duane Jackson from “The Last Picture Show.”

“It’s a lot of fun to do this, and doing it with “Tron” was a wonderful experience,” says Bridges. “And I go to do that with another movie, “The Last Picture Show” – 20 years later we did “Texasville,” and now I was just in Texas with Peter Bogdanovich and we’re looking at doing the next installment of the Texas series. There’re actually five books that Larry McMurtry wrote about those characters and so we’ve done two and we want do the next thing. I don’t know if that’s ever happened before, you know? Every 20 years going back and doing that. So that’s something that I’m hoping will come about.”

Bridges rose to fame as part of the cast of then-largely-unknowns (including Cybill Shepherd, Timothy Bottoms, Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn and Eileen Brennan) in Bogdanovich’s 1971 film adaptation of McMurtry’s 1966 novel about small-town Texans, which was followed up on screen 19 years later in 1990 with “Texasville,” from McMurtry’s 1987 book sequel. In the intervening years, McMurtry’s penned three more installments in the series: 1999’s Duane’s Depressed, 2007’s When the Light Goes Out, and 2009’s conclusion Rhino Ranch.

And while he may be secure for work well into his 80s if the Texas series keeps coming back, we had to ask about the one Bridges character we’d most love to see him torch up again: Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski. And yeah, if the Coen brothers are willing, Bridges says he’s able.

“Oh yeah – are you kidding me?” he laughs. “I don’t think they will, but it’s kind of set up like that with the, ‘I happen to know there’s a little Dude in the oven’ or whatever he says – I can’t remember the line. But you know it’s set up for that!”

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