Jeff Bridges on how he helped re-write Iron Man

Remember back in 2008 when Marvel was just starting out and their expanded cinematic universe was just a glint in producer Kevin Feige’s eye? That year, the first Iron Man film was released and while it was considered a bit of a risk at the time (not just the film but the casting of post-controversy Robert Downey Jnr) but they needn’t have worried: the film was a smash, grossing over $585million worldwide.

One of the trump cards Marvel had up its sleeve was the casting of Jeff Bridges as the film’s big-bad Obadiah Stone, and speaking this week on The Hollywood Reporter’s “Actor Roundtable” series, the Oscar winner has revealed that he helped quite a bit in reshaping both the character and the script right up to the start of filming.

Bridges said: “‘Iron Man’ — we read the script, and it wasn’t really right, you know? We had two weeks’ rehearsal, and we basically rewrote the script… And the day before we were going to shoot, we get a call from the Marvel guy, saying, ‘Oh, no, no, no. None of this is right.’ So we would muster in my trailer and rehearse while the guys were in the studio tapping their foot, saying, ‘When are they going to come?’ We were still trying to figure out the [scenes] we were going to shoot.”

Also part of the roundtable was Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Dev Patel, Andrew Garfield, Mahershala Ali and Casey Affleck, and through the discussions around the group, Bridges also mentioned that Affleck almost played his son in 2011’s Tron: Legacy.

“I thought one time you would be my son in that thing,” Bridges said to Affleck, with the Manchester by the Sea star replying: “Yeah. I asked them to recast my father, and they wouldn’t do it!”