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"I enjoy playing terrible, kinky, messed-up, sick people," Bridges offers. "I enjoy playing truly heroic people. I enjoy playing all aspects of humanity. I don't want to set any limits. I'll play everything."

Right now, showing off the picture of Jane Fonda in a bathrobe that he snapped on the set of The Morning After, Bridges is playing the role of gracious host. He is arguably the best-behaved, mellowest movie star in Hollywood. He's never been known to throw a temper tantrum in his trailer. Never been known to engage in any on-set hanky-panky (he's been married 17 years). Never announced a drug- or sex-addiction problem on Larry King Live. Plopped on his living-room sofa just a few hours before attending Blown Away's Los Angeles premiere, looking like a Woodstock survivor in his shaggy Wild Bill 'do and fuzzy mustache, the dude seems so laid-back you worry he's going to tip over and fall on the floor.

"He's an old hippie," offers Peter Bogdanovich, who directed Bridges in The Last Picture Show and again, 20 years later, in its sequel, Texasville. "There's a bohemian quality about him. He's very in tune with his spirit. He's very sensitive. He wrote me a letter — the nicest letter I ever got. He wrote it in 1977, but he didn't give it to me until 1990. He held on to it for 13 years. Who does that kind of thing?"

On screen, Bridges is equally easy to take. He sinks into his characters without a whiff of actorly angst or ego, transforming himself so subtly and quietly that the lines of his own personality seem to evaporate. "Well, that's what good acting is, isn't it?" says John Hurt, who costarred with Bridges in the Heaven's Gate debacle ("It wasn't that bad," Bridges insists. "In 15 years, when the bad reviews burn off, people will look at it differently") and is working with him again in Wild Bill. "There are basically two types of stars. The type who has a Hollywood writer tailor a script to his personality and the type who finds the character and turns himself into it by acting. Jeff is the second type."

Bridges recalls his first acting lesson: "My dad sat me on his bed when I started doing Sea Hunt and taught me the basics. I was 7 or 8 years old and he was telling me how important it was to listen to the other guy, that you can't just wait for his mouth to stop moving and then say your lines. He taught me how you had to make it appear as if everything was happening for the first time, even though you were saying your lines over and over again."

The acting advice continues to this day. "We shared ideas on the set of Blown Away," Bridges says. "He'd give me suggestions, I'd give him suggestions. Sometimes we'd get on each other's nerves. But we'd just tell each other to shut up. 'Leave me alone! Let me do it my way!'"

One early lesson that obviously stuck: Research the part. Bridges has always been a maniac for studying his characters. For Blown Away, he tagged along with a real Boston bomb-squad team on a bomb call. "The guy who was defusing it had never done one before," Bridges says, cheerfully. "It was his first time out." For consultations in Los Angeles, he had an LAPD bomb expert hanging out on the set ("He would have me go through a scene and observe how I walked and talked and my facial expressions," says the LAPD's Herb Williams).

And for Wild Bill, Bridges is hitting the books, immersing himself in biographies and pictures of his character. "This guy had an amazing life," he says. "He was a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War. He'd dress up in a Confederate uniform and go over the border. He was also an actor. Out West he'd be a marshal and kill all these guys, then he'd go to New York and play himself on stage, theatricalizing his own experiences. He became famous for it. Eventually, he became a prisoner of it — a prisoner of his own fame."

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