Jeff Bridges is the kind of guy you’d like for a friend. He’s affable and honest, and completely unspoiled by the Hollywood successes of his father Lloyd and his own considerable clout.
In fact, he’s really just a sensitive guy — still in love with his wife, Susie, after three decades of marriage.
“We’ve been married 33 years, and it just keeps getting better, more intimate, sexier, and you want to keep that going, you don’t want to mess with that, you want to keep it constant,” says the former teen heartthrob.
Bridges is currently starring in the black comedy The Men Who Stare at Goats, a sharp look at U.S. paranormal military experiments begun during the Vietnam War — and which he says may still be in use.
Bridges’ character formulates Project Jedi, a New Age soliders’ initiative, with the full blessing of the military.
“I got to talk to Lt. Colonel Jim Channon, the guy who my character is based on, who is still very much into this thing,” says Bridges
“If you go to his website, First Earth Battalion you can see what he’s up to and it’s basically it’s the same stuff.”
According to Channon’s site “Project Jedi was … undertaken by the US military in the late 1970s to create a super soldier that would possess superior strength, intelligence, cunning, intuition.”
Bridges says he asked Channon if he felt the film made a mockery of his experiments and his life.
“He said ‘No, I just want people to come to my website, people who are going to get it are going to get it. People who are going to pooh-pooh it are going to pooh-pooh it, but the people who have a little bit of curiosity, and are really going to get it. That’s what I’m looking for. Those are the people I’m trying to attract.’”
Copious amounts of LSD are used by the characters in the film, and Bridges says it brought back memories of the ’60s for him — including the former Sea Hunt star’s time with John Lilly.
“He was the one communicating with dolphins. He invented the isolation tank, and I was actually a subject for his testing, saw what the tank was like. I did a lot of time in the tank.”
