Jeff's still burning his Bridges

At 51, Jeff Fridges just gets hotter with every film. Next up it's psycho-drama K-PAX.

'I do look forward to the day when I can retire,' muses a thoughtful Jeff Bridges.

Thankfully, at 51, the man film critic Janet Maslin once called 'the most underappreciated actor of his generation' still has a few years left before he picks up his pension. In fact, Bridges, who received his fourth Oscar nomination earlier this year for his portrayal of a fictional US president in Rod Lurie's The Contender, has entered the autumn of his career with renewed vigour.

His latest film, K-PAX, which closes the London Film Festival, sees him team up with two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey for a feelgood melodrama liable to perform solidly at the box-office in light of recent world events. But this father of three (daughters - Isabelle, Jessica and Hayley) is not one for the celebrity carousel that surrounds the business of making movies. Married for 25 years to photographer Susan Geston, whom he met while filming Rancho Deluxe, Bridges is first and foremost a family man. 'Maybe I took a tip from my father [the actor Lloyd Bridges], who didn't go to parties,' he says. Moreover, he's well aware of the monster Hollywood has become since he began acting 50 years and almost 60 films ago. 'So much of the ugly business is down to big corporations in Hollywood,' he says. 'Back in the Sixties and Seventies, you had companies such as BBS, who produced The Last Picture Show and Easy Rider and great movies like that. Now it's all about box office. I'm not against doing a bigger-budget movie. But I find that most of the good scripts are for smaller films.'

He cites Dominique Forma's forthcoming tense thriller Scenes Of The Crime, in which Bridges stars opposite ER's Noah Wyle as a kidnapped mobster held at gunpoint in a transit van while his life is used as a bargaining chip. Set almost entirely in the street where the van is parked, it's an unusual chamber-piece reminiscent of many of the actor's best works. From roles in the aforementioned The Last Picture Show and Thunderbolt And Lightfoot (gleaning him his first two Best Supporting Actor nominations), to Cutter's Way, Tucker: The Man And His Dream, The Fisher King, Fearless and The Big Lebowski, the chameleon-like Bridges has largely chosen to immerse himself in low-key character-driven dramas. The exceptions - mid-Eighties blockbusters Jagged Edge and Against All Odds, as well as the remake of King Kong - are perhaps Bridges's least successful outings. Which brings us to K-PAX.

'K-PAX is actually a pretty big film,' says Bridges. 'It was made by Universal, so it's a studio picture. But it's also being produced by Larry Gordon, who goes way, way back to the Seventies with films such as The Driver, so it has independent roots.' The project began life after Gordon bought the screen rights to Gene Brewer's 1995 cult novel of the same name, immediately after it was published. Spacey was first on board, swiftly followed by British director Iain Softley, who we last saw sex up Henry James's The Wings Of The Dove - a 'very good' film, according to Bridges. Understandably, when Bridges came to the project, the producer Larry Gordon announced that his pairing with Spacey was 'perfect casting'.

'That was a big attraction, to work with Kevin,' says Bridges. 'But the script and the story were so great, too. In Starman I played the alien. Here it's the other way round.' John Carpenter's heartwarming 1984 film, which afforded Bridges his only Best Actor nomination to date, saw him play a man who fell to Earth and fell in love. This time, Bridges plays Dr Mark Powell, a psychiatrist for an underfunded New York public hospital who receives a patient (Spacey) who calls himself Prot and believes he is from a distant planet named K-PAX. While Powell is initially convinced that Prot is suffering from severe delusions, his patient's knowledge and unearthly behaviour slowly begin to persuade him otherwise. 'It's a lot of different things, but I guess you could call it a psychological drama,' says Bridges. 'I think what's popular now in psychiatry is medication, and there are certainly good things that can be done with medication. But the interaction with patients isn't used as much as it used to be. When medication doesn't seem to have too much effect on this particular fellow, who claims to be an alien, it intrigues my character and makes him more interested, both in his work and in his life.'

As he has over a dozen times in the past, Bridges recorded his experience with a series of photographs detailing his time on set. Having also recently cut an album entitled Be Here Soon, an eclectic mix of rock, jazz and R&B, produced by former Doobie Brothers frontman Michael McDonald, Bridges sees both extracurricular activities as a way of tuning into his characters. 'It's funny. I used to find it irritating because I'd get a part, and get distracted by a song or a painting and I'd think, "Aagh, I should be studying my lines!"'

Although Bridges starred with his sibling Beau in The Fabulous Baker Boys in 1989, it was his father Lloyd, who died in 1998, who proved the most profound influence. Bridges began his career with his father, making appearances on the early Sixties programme The Lloyd Bridges Show. 'He was a brilliant actor, for whom his talent was a double-edged sword,' says Bridges. 'In Sea Hunt [Lloyd's most famous TV series], he played the part so well that people thought he was Mike Nelson, the good-guy. So from then on that was the only sort of part he was offered, even though he was a Shakespearean actor who had done plays on Broadway. So I can see how typecasting is dangerous. That made me really conscious of switching my roles.'

He thinks for a minute. 'I like to be in films and do parts that I like to see - ones in which the actor or director is ahead of the audience, so you don't know what will happen next.'