'Seventh Son' Is Deeper Than Your Average Good & Evil Film

For a legendarily chill individual, Oscar-winning actor Jeff Bridges has lately displayed a real facility for playing cantankerous, curmudgeonly old bastards. The latest one he tackles is Master Gregory, a surly, grumpy witch-hunter in the new fantasy film Seventh Son, in which he and young apprentice Thomas (UK actor Ben Barnes) take on a variety of sorcerers and creatures as they head towards a showdown with the magical, shape-shifting Mother Malkin (Julianne Moore), who is bent on world domination and revenge. Bridges is all for embracing characters who are a bit out-of-sorts (“You can’t always play The Dude, man,” he laughs, referring to his iconic, laidback character from the Coens’ Big Lebowski), but when it comes to Seventh Son, his sympathies lie with Moore’s character, who emerges from a century-long imprisonment by Father Gregory – her former lover – with payback in mind. “She has every right to be pissed off,” he says. “Her boyfriend, who she loves, locked her in a hole for a hundred years!”

Much has been made of Bridges and Moore reuniting for the first time since they shared a handful of memorable scenes together as The Dude and Maude in Lebowski – “It was like we had a long weekend and just picked up where we left off,” recalls Bridges – and the actor actually speculates that Seventh Son could well be viewed as a medieval prequel to the Coens’ cult classic. “There are some kinds of weird parallels,” he laughs. “I think of Maude flying with the paint is kind of like her dragon. The Dude liked to smoke it and drink it, and, you know, Gregory... well, I’m sure he’s got some kind of smoking mixture that he would probably enlighten you on. There are probably some similarities.”

“It was like we had a long weekend and just picked up where we left off”

Don’t go thinking, though, that Bridges didn’t take seriously his characterisation or his investigation into Seventh Son’s ideas seriously. While he feels a strong sense of make-believe and enjoyment of the process is vital, he is quick to praise his collaborators on both sides of the camera and to delve into the discussions he had with the movie’s director, award-winning Russian filmmaker Sergei Bodrov. “One of the things that I was really hoping that the film could convey is rather than the traditional battle between good and evil, that it could go a little deeper than that. In my research, I came across this quote I’ll read to you by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and I knew we had a Russian director and when I read this, he goes ‘Oh yeah, of course.’ Here’s the quote: ‘If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’ And I’m hoping that is in the movie somewhere.”