Jeff Bridges Says Marvel Threw Out Iron Man Script When Filming Began

The first Iron Man movie was the spark that ignited a universe and several dollars later at the box office. It helped rejuvenate Robert Downey, Jr's career and helped launch more than a few for other stars. Jeff Bridges has his own piece of the MCU's mythos as the villain Obadiah Stanein the film, from director Jon Favreau.

Looking back on his career with Variety, the Oscar-winning actor talked about how excited he was to work on something like Iron Man, but the production started off rough and became more intense from there, starting with issues with the script.

"The first day of shooting...Marvel kind of threw out our script that we had been working on, said, 'No, that's no good. It’s got to be this and that,'" Bridges said. "And so there was a lot of confusion about what our script was, what we were gonna say. We'd spend hours in one of our trailers going over lines and exploring how we were going to do it."

Bridges said that director Favreau reached out to screenwriting friends to get advice on the script and how to handle the story. All the while, this process infuriated and confused Bridges.

"It drove me absolutely crazy until I made a slight adjustment in my brain that was, 'Jeff, just relax. You're making a $200 million student film. Just relax and have fun,'" Bridges explained. "And that kind of did the trick because here I get to play with these two incredible artists and just jam, and that’s what we ended up doing."

Iron Man would go on to gross over $585 million, becoming the eighth-highest grossing film of 2008. It had the second-best premiere for a non-sequel, behind Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, and the fourth biggest opening for a superhero film.