Nearly ten years ago, Marvel started what would become a cinematic universe spanning blockbuster behemoth with “Iron Man.” Jon Favreau proved he could make popcorn spectacle for a mass audience, Robert Downey Jr.‘s career became fully revived, and Marvel showed you can take a smaller, less known comic character and make it shine. Most of the actors in the film would go on to play in the Marvel sandbox in future films….except one notable name.
Jeff Bridges‘ villain Obadiah Stane was presumed dead at the end of “Iron Man,” and the actor reveals that in the original script, that wasn’t supposed to happen.
“…in the script, the script that I hired onto, my character lives! They open my suit up and I’m gone,” he told Uproxx. “But then when we got to shoot that scene, they didn’t open my suit up! I said, ‘Aren’t you going to open my suit up?’ They said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘You’re going to kill my guy?’ And they say, ‘Well, it’s a comic book. You could come back. Who knows?’ You know? But anyway.”
READ MORE: ‘Thor: Ragnarok’ Will “Drastically” Change MCU
As has been well documented by now, “Iron Man” flew by the seat of its pants during the production. Way back in 2009, Bridges revealed, “They had no script, man. They had an outline. We would show up for big scenes every day and we wouldn’t know what we were going to say. We would have to go into our trailer and work on this scene and call up writers on the phone, ‘You got any ideas?’ ”
Even last year, Bridges elaborated a bit more on how it all went down, and the crazy conditions they were under to make the movie.
” ‘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,” he explained. “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.”
Ultimately, Bridges remains pragmatic about the whole thing, and stays optimistic that maybe his character will somehow will return (though we kinda doubt it).
“Well, who knows? They might bring him back, maybe they’re right. It’s a comic book and anything in comic book land can happen. So who knows?” Bridges reflected.
But don’t worry about Bridges, because he’s still got plenty of blockbuster heat, and will be starring in next month’s “Kingsman: The Golden Circle.”
