Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Award Winning Actor Beau Bridges

I recently interviewed award-winning actor Beau Bridges on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today has spent more than 75 years acting in television and movies and has earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame along the way. Beau Bridges is a three-time Emmy winner, two-time Golden Globe winner, and a Grammy Award winner. Bea, thank you for joining us.

Beau: Glad to be here with you, Adam.

Adam: You grew up in the neighborhood on the west side of Los Angeles, and your dad was a legendary actor, the great Lloyd Bridges. You spent a lot of time as a kid on all kinds of movie sets. You acted in your first film when you were six. Can you take listeners back to those early days what early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?

Beau: Yeah, well, I was very fortunate to have a mother and father who were very involved in my life as I was growing up. They were wonderful parents. My dad, being an actor, was traveling a lot, but when I was very young. Before I got into school, I would travel with him to a lot of the locations. I remember one time being with him when he was making High Noon, the movie with Gary Cooper in Sonora, California, and it was a big fight scene. And because I usually would visit the sets, and he said, "Today there's a fight scene between Mr. Cooper and myself, and you've got to keep your mouth shut, because Mr Cooper's not feeling really well, and this is a big scene. We're fighting each other, but it's all choreographed. Nobody's getting hurt, so you don't have to worry about that. I'll find a place for you where you can watch, but you've got to be quiet." And I promised him I would. And we went there, and there was a hayloft in this barn, and he got me up in there, and he looked down. I could watch it all. And it was a hell of a fight. It's one of the classic Western fights, I think, of all time between my dad and Gary Cooper. They rolled around under these horses at the end, but I wasn't nervous, because my dad told me that they weren't getting hurt. And then at the end, Cooper cold my dad hits him hard, and my dad goes down. I'm not worried, because he told me everything was okay. My dad's lying there. But what I wasn't prepared for was that Cooper went and picked up a pail of water, and threw it on my dad, I burst into laughter and ruined the tape, and oh, my dad was furious with me. Riding back to the hotel, he said, "I told you to keep your mouth shut. Why couldn't you have done that?" That felt so bad. We get into the hotel and we're waiting there to go up the elevator to have something to eat. And who walks into the elevator? Mr. Cooper. And my dad still reeling with this problem of me mouthing off. He says, "How are you doing? Coop? You're okay?" Cooper said, "Yeah, I'm fine, Lloyd." And I just thought, oh, here he comes. And then Cooper says, "Why don't you guys join me for dinner?" But yeah, I traveled a lot with my dad, and when he was home, he was very involved with me as a father. So it was great growing up. Went to Venice High School. I can remember walking on the beach, and the water was so pristine. Now it's kind of different. It was a great time.

Adam: I love the story with Gary Cooper and your dad, and you've spent so much time around so many iconic figures in Hollywood. High Noon, one of the all-time great movies, Gary Cooper, one of the legends in Hollywood history. Who have been the people you have been around, who you've learned the most from, and what have you learned from them?

Beau: Well, my main mentor was my father, who taught me that respect was important, respect for yourself, for your fellow actors, for your fellow human beings, and respect for the planet. Also, another big mentor in my life was my coach. UCLA. I played basketball there under Coach John Wooden and he was an incredible coach. He won almost 10 national championships in a row, which would probably never be done again. But beyond that, he really cared about his players, all of us, as citizens, and created something called the pyramid of success he created as an English teacher. And what it is is a pyramid with all the different blocks and characteristics that you need to find success and to coach success had nothing to do with winning. It had to do with finding peace of mind. And how you find peace of mind is leaving the task or the game as it was in basketball, knowing that you've done your very best and then you can't lose. The two cornerstones of the pyramid are industriousness, hard work, enthusiasm, and joy. Because coach said anybody can bring hard work to the table, but if you bring it in combination with joy, that's when incredible things can happen. And this guy won 10 straight national championships, so he knew what he was talking about. So those guys were important to me. I also worked with Sidney Poitier early in my career, and he had a real effect on me, just as the man that he was, and he helped guide me in many aspects of my life.

Adam: You brought up John Wooden, the topic that I wanted to talk to you about earlier guest of my podcast was the great Bill Walton. May he rest in peace. And Bill Walton spent a ton of time talking about John Wooden. What he learned from John Wooden, his relationship with John Wooden, I know that you not only played for one year with John Wooden but really had a lifelong friendship with the legendary coach and you shared some of the great lessons you learned from him, the importance of industriousness, hard work, joy. Can you share with listeners a little bit more about how that relationship evolved from you being a player, playing for him your freshman year at UCLA to ultimately evolving into this deep friendship where you were able to learn from him over the course of decades and decades?

Beau: Yeah, well, I think there was little over 300 of us that played under coach, and he was involved in all of our lives, even the ones like me who sat on the bench most of the time. I was nowhere near as talented as the guys that I played with, but he cared about us as individuals, and he would have breakfast many mornings at VIPs, a great restaurant on Ventura Boulevard, VIP's. It's still there. It's a great place to have breakfast. There's a little plaque above the booth that he'd like to sit on. And yeah, all the players, we come, we bring our kids, our grandkids, and sit and visit with him. And he was always so gracious. What happened with me is I got my career going as an actor after college and am still in touch with my coach, he began writing books and getting involved and speaking engagements, and, of course, garnering a lot of awards. And they started to reach out to me to give him these awards and be there with him. He called us a dog at the pony show, and then I ended up narrating a lot of his books, being his voice on the books or tape, a lot of the books he created, yeah, so it was a great relationship. And coach, he almost made 100 he was close to it. But, yeah, what a great guy. I was lucky.

Adam: And an important takeaway is mentor-mentee relationships are very fluid. They evolve. Someone can start off as a mentor, and the next thing you know, they're learning from you. It's a give-and-take. If a relationship is going to be sustained, both parties have to want to be there at the end of the day. You both have to want to be at VIPs.

Beau: Yeah, and you have to grow with one another, too. In the relationship, my wife was telling me something that I didn't know about Bill Walton and his relationship with the coach. I mean, it started off as kind of a tough relationship, because Bill was very liberal in his outlook on life and politically and all. And the coach was a bit conservative, and Bill wanted to grow his beard and his long hair, and then got him to hassles about that. But she told me that I guess Bill was in Florida protesting out on the street or something and got arrested and thrown into jail And who battled him out? Coach, which is really incredible.

Adam: That's what it's all about. Something that Bill shared on 30-minute mentors, is one of John Wooden's great regrets in life. After creating the pyramid of success, he realized that he left out perhaps the most important pillar of them all, which is love.

Beau: That's interesting.

Adam: You've been around so many great leaders, including a couple who we've talked about. In your experience, what are the key characteristics of a great leader, and what can anyone do to become a better leader?

Beau: I think kindness and love are certainly important for a leader, and also forgiveness, acceptance, and acknowledging all of the people that you're leading as all equal human beings, we all have a bit of the divine in essence. We're all to be respected, no matter where we're coming from in terms of our political alignments or the way we dress our culture. We're all basically part of the human family, and I think that needs to be acknowledged, certainly by a leader.

Adam: And the same could be said for a great mentor-mentee relationship, entering every relationship with an open mind, you're the star of a new movie camera where you play a mentor to a boy who can't speak. Can you talk about what you personally took away from that experience portraying a mentor?

Beau: Yeah, the movie camera came to me. The script was sent to me by Jay Silverman, the man who created the project. And I just love the story. I mean, the story is always the most important element for me in a film, and I thought it was really well rendered, and it's really about family, which always gets my attention. Stories about family, but this is a different sort of family because it involves two lost souls, this young man who lost his father, and my character, an older guy who lost a son and a wife, and he's by himself. And they find each other, kind of miraculously, by accident, and they decide to reach out, and they become a family, the two of them, and that extends to the whole community that they live in, becomes their family. I don't want to give away too much of the story, but that's kind of what it is. I am a mentor to this kid, but like you said earlier, I learned a lot from him, and he fills up my world in a really positive way as well.

Adam: Mentorship, family. You are the older brother to a well-known actor who you have mentored over a long period of time. Can you share with listeners what you've taken away from being a mentor to your younger brother Jeff?

Beau: Yeah, I'm eight years older than Jeff, and as my dad got going on in his career, he would travel even more so I was, in many respects, with my younger brother filling the space of my father, teaching him how to throw a baseball to catch all of that. By the way, my brother recently, not too long ago, was asked to throw in the first pitch at the Dodger game in the stadium. And I said, for goodness sake, throw a strike, man. I said, you throw it, bouncing it in and all this. My brother's kind of a perfectionist, and he started really training on it, trying to make sure it would happen. He says I'm so nervous about it. He says, "I don't know if I can throw it that far." And I said, "Well, you know what? Why don't you bowl it?" And that's it. Of course, they loved it. Dodgers made him throw it. And I don't know if he threw a strike, but at least he got it there, into the country. I still continue to have a lot of fun with my brother. I have people come on the street and sometimes mistake me and they say, oh, Jeff. I said, no, no, no, I'm the pretty one. But we're best friends. We spend a lot of time together. When you have long-term relationships, either with family or friends, it does take nurturing. It does take an effort to maintain that relationship, and our wives sort of figure that out for us and we sort of made it a goal to get together at least once a month, not too far apart from each other where we live. We can usually make that happen. Sometimes it's a challenge because we're both working and moving around, but yeah, we try to do that, and it's great.

Adam: You've had a really interesting career in Hollywood, not an easy business. You've had a lot of highs, a lot of lows, ups and downs. It hasn't been a linear path to success. There have been moments in your career where you've been at the top, winning awards. You've had other moments where it's been harder to find work, where you haven't been as in demand. What have been the keys to navigating the ups and downs, the highs and lows? And what advice do you have for anyone listening on how to navigate the nonlinear path that they're inevitably going to be going down?

Beau: Well, recently, I've been reacquainted with a song that I loved so many years ago that I'd forgotten. Secret Of Life written by James Taylor, and I would encourage anyone to listen to it again. It's such a great song, but the opening stanza that James Taylor wrote was "The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time'. It's such a profound statement, I think, because so often, myself included, we tend to be worried about the passage of time or tread over it, and what's lost, what we didn't do right, we could have done what's coming up, all of this when it's the natural state of things that time passes, and instead of worrying about it, you should enjoy the passage of time, because that's part of the experience. And I liked getting back in touch with that idea through that song. I've been mentioning that to a lot of my friends and my family, I think that's what I try to do, the ups and the downs.

Adam: How are you able to shift your mindset, to get to a place where you're able to enjoy the passage of time?

Beau: I think a lot of it is just being grateful. I'm grateful for every breath I take. I'm grateful for the air I breathe. I mean, it's all miraculous. And I try to mention that to myself, out to the spirit, just to be grateful and glad to be alive.

Adam: I love that. You've been in so many different movies, television shows, and miniseries. Can you describe your process? What goes into getting to a place where you're able to perform at that level?

Beau: Well, my daughter, Emily, and... I only have one daughter, like four boys, and Emily and I wrote a play about a little over 10 years ago now, I guess based on a book that my father gave me when I was 16 years old called Acting: The First Six Lessons by Richard Boleslawski. And he gave the book to my brother Jeff, and my sister Cindy, who, in turn, we've all given that book to our children. It's a great book. Richard Boleslawski, who wrote it, was a student of Konstantin Stanislavski, the Russian guy years ago. Boleslawski

  was the first person to bring Stanislavski's method of acting, called the method, which revolutionized how actors work, certainly in America. And he was the first one to bring it to the West. And in this book, it's a very thin book, my kind of book. What's really wonderful about it is that not only does it break down a method and approach to acting, but it also is a relationship between a teacher and a student, which, again, is the mentor thing. And my daughter brought it to me and said, "Geez, dad, let's write a play based on this book, because it's so interesting, this teacher and student." And so we did, and we performed it in LA it was really fun working with her. And then recently, a couple of years ago, it was made into a movie, and it's streaming. People could get it, and my daughter directed me, and that she was my boss and was really fun, and that book really is what I learned. Those are my tools to be an actor. And it's basically working with your life and trying to bring that to the work, your life experience

Adam: You bring up having your daughter as a boss, and it really comes full circle working with your dad, working with your brother, working with your daughter, and how relationships can manifest themselves in all different shapes, sizes, forms, and formats. Can you talk about how you've been able to develop winning relationships in Hollywood, and your best advice for anyone on how to cultivate successful relationships?

Beau: My father really loved working with family. He began that tradition in our family, and I've continued it with my kids. I mean, they're all one way or another involved in the business. In fact, my son Ezekiel, he's in the movie Camera. He plays one of the fishermen guys. He's the guy that gets in a fight and punches that guy. And I love working with family, like when Jeff and I did The Fabulous Baker Boys, it was so much fun because it's a shortcut to a relationship. We were playing brothers in that one. So there was a lot of stuff that happened between us that we didn't even have to work for because it was just there, but also, as my dad told me in the very beginning when I started to seriously go about trying to get jobs and be an actor, he said, "Son, you saw when I went out on my first day of work, you could tell I was nervous." And he said, "Relax because you're now joining a family that is much larger than your own, that's the family of actors." And he said, "So they'll take care of you. Just relax." And it's true. I mean, I remember I was doing a movie The Landlord, and we were shooting in an area of New York that at the time was a pretty disenfranchised community. A lot of the people needed support and everything, and now it was the Park Slope Area. Now it's totally gentrified, and property is like in the millions there. But at the time, it was not like that. And Hal Ashby, our director, we were all a little concerned, because there had been a movie called Cotton Comes to Harlem that had been filmed in Harlem. This is, I think, 1979 and they had been shooting there a couple of months before us. And the local folks there were standing on the rooftops, and the film was shooting down below them, and some guy fired a rifle and hit the first assistant director. Didn't kill him, but wounded him pretty well. And so then we came in a month or two later, we were going to be in the streets of New York, and everyone was concerned. And Hal said, "No. I don't want any police in our film. Just introduce me to the baddest cat in the neighborhood. This guy came up and introduced himself as number one, and Hal gave him a part in the movie. And the first scene that I shot, I came out from California and all these New York actors, I didn't know any of them, and I'm dressed in a white suit, my costume, and I pull up in front of this townhouse there in the neighborhood and buying it, kicking out all the tenants. The movie was about gentrification. All these guys were sitting in the front and black guys and Latinos, and they were all New York actors. I didn't know any of them. As I pull in for the potted plant to take to my new place, I bump into one of the cars in front of the place, and these guys go, "Oh," like this. And then they all stand up, and they come over to me, and number one starts it by throwing a karate kick into my face, and I run, as soon as I'm running down three or four blocks, the heat of summer, and these guys chasing me down the street, and the local folks, the real folks, were standing on the rooftops, and they're yelling as I'm running down there, "Get that white*25:29, this yelling and then running down there. And now I'm three or four blocks down, the shot is over, and I'm looking back, and I have to walk all the way back to where the cameras are, and I'm thinking, I'm going to take a bullet here, this is it. And I was so nervous. As I'm walking back, I feel this big arm come around me, and he starts talking to me, and he says, "So I hear you play a little ball*25:54. Is that true?" "Yeah." He's just making small talk. "Who do you like? You liked the lake?" 26:01*. He's talking to me, and I realized that what he's doing, this actor who I'd never known before, without saying anything, he's telling these folks on the rooftop that if you want to shoot this guy, you're going to have to get me too. And that's what my dad was talking about. Family. That actor was Lou Gossett, who recently passed. Sweet Lou and he became my lifelong friend, and that's what we are together to each other as actors. We are a family, and we'll die for each other sometimes.

Adam: Wow, I love that story. So many great takeaways. The importance of viewing people around you as family, treating people around you as family. I love that. The director basically had two choices going into this situation. He could have been confrontational, or adversarial. We're gonna come in and do this and push you guys out. That would not have gone over well at all. Instead, he took the exact opposite tact and gave the most influential guy in the neighborhood a part in the movie. And by doing that, that solved all the problems, and not only did it solve all the problems, but it created a star in Lou Gossett. What a great story.

Beau: The women in the community actually, were the people that first welcomed us and they opened up their homes to have lunches for us and stuff, and we ended up playing basketball with each other and all the local dudes in the neighborhood, in the park there, it was great.

Adam: I love that you've spent your life in front of the camera, communicating to audiences. You won a Grammy for it. What are your best tips on the topic of communication?

Beau: Well, for me, what I love most about the job that I do is telling the stories. I mean, it's such an ancient situation. I mean, since the beginning of time, people sitting around a campfire and telling stories of what happened in the village right around the bend. And we still do that same thing now, and just technology has changed it. You can watch a movie on your watch now, and so the technology changes, but the idea of telling stories continues, and to be a part of it is a real blessing. I love it. You're doing it yourself as well, and it's a great feeling.

Adam: I love it too. And as someone who's spent a lifetime in this medium, what advice do you have for anyone listening to this conversation on how to become a better communicator?

Beau: I think basically, just to do it, find a way to do it. Don't wait for the phone to ring and have somebody give you an opportunity. Just go out and do it. When COVID hit, a lot of us were left without work and just wondering, how do we tell the stories? How do we communicate? And my wife, Wendy, actually was the one that got me going, and she said, look, "Let's start a story reading thing for kids. Let's tell stories for the children." So once a week, we would put on this show that lasted about a half hour, and it always started with our two little French Bulldogs sitting on a chair. She'd be my camera person, and she'd film them, and then I'd come into it and I'd read kids' stories. And we did that for several months, and then I ended up just telling stories about my own life, which is the only thing that was authentic, that I could share, and I'd written a bunch of them down, and I just started reading some of the stories in my life, and it ended up being really fun and enjoyable, and it wasn't a job that we were getting paid for, but just the idea of communicating and being a part of the storytelling business was great and was fun and helped us get through the whole COVID thing.

Adam: That's really universally applicable advice, no matter what we're pursuing, you really need to go after it. You really need to make it happen. It's very rare that people are going to knock on your door and come directly to you and say, "Here. I have this for you." It happens, but there are times when that doesn't happen. And when that doesn't happen, you need to figure out a way to make something happen. Go after it. Go get it, even if it's not exactly what you want to do. If you're passionate about something, pursue that passion. Go after it. Well, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful, personally and professionally?

Beau: Oh, gosh, I think just listen to your own beat, your own rhythm, your own song, and have faith in it. Have faith in yourself, and go for it. Yeah, don't be afraid.

Adam: Beau, thank you for all the advice, and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

Beau: Yeah, great talking to you, Adam. Have a wonderful day, man.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one-on-one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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