Bruce Dern has been out promoting his movie “Nebraska” for months now. The film opened in New York in November — but with awards season upon us, the campaign trail is fast and furious.
But Dern, the film’s 77-year-old star, isn’t sick of it.
Not just yet, anyway.
“I’m a good historian about myself, so it’s not hard to wander through the 55, 56 years of my career,” he tells The Post. “I’m not really tired from it. S- – t, I waited 50 years. You kidding me?”
The latest stop on Dern’s path is sitting down with James Lipton for Bravo’s “Inside the Actors Studio” Thursday at 7 p.m. alongside his famous daughter Laura Dern.
It’s a feather in the cap for a guy who has appeared in more than 80 films, perhaps most notably in Hal Ashby’s 1978 movie “Coming Home,” for which Dern was nominated for an Oscar. Along the way, Dern has worked with some our most legendary filmmakers, including Elia Kazan, John Frankenheimer and Alfred Hitchcock, who directed him several times (and in whose TV show, “Alfred Hitchock Presents,” Dern appeared).
“You’re thrilled when Mr. Hitchock picked you out of anyone he could have in the world,” says Dern of working with the late, great director on “Family Plot.” “His frames — the setup of the shot — were the most restrictive frames I’ve ever worked with in my life. And yet within that setup, I had as much freedom with him as I’ve ever had with any director in my life.
“He simply thought that all the frames of the movie were perfect and had them drawn on the board in his office — 1,200 of them,” says Dern. “But none of them were entertaining, he felt, therefore he put me there and Barbara Harris there — who was my partner in the movie — to entertain them and make the frames come alive.”
But his latest director, Alexander Payne, had something even those fellas didn’t, says Dern.
“He invades your privacy in a way that’s acceptable to an audience, and that’s something I hadn’t bene involved in before,” says Dern. “I mean, I’ve worked with brilliant directors, but none of them seemed to be able to deal with private issues in such a magnificent way.”
In “Nebraska,” Dern plays Woody Grant, an elderly man suffering from dementia who mistakenly believes he’s won $1 million from a spam mailer and needs to go claim his prize.
Critics have been generous with the kudos for Dern’s performance. It’s not so much Oscar buzz as it is an Oscar roar — at this point, should he not be nominated for best actor, it would be a total shock.
“To be nominated for an Academy Award would be a treat. Anything that happens after that, at least you’ve been asked to go to dinner,” he jokes.
It’s a long way to come for a guy who’s been called a “character actor” for decades.
“When people come up and they say, ‘You’re a character actor,’ well, that’s fine. I mean, Woody’s a character. He’s certainly not a conventional leading man,” says Dern of his “Nebraska” alter-ego.
“You know and at the end of their careers, although Paul Newman and Steve McQueen were obviously leading-men movie stars, they went to doing more character stuff. When Paul Newman would start going out and being part of a movie instead of the whole movie, [he] took risks and chances to do things,” Dern says.
“All actors want[ed] to be able to do that, but in the studio system, you couldn’t do that. They wouldn’t let you do that because they wanted you to promote the studio and its product. ”
Now, half a century after he entered the game, Dern is finally getting that leading man respect.
“This is really disgusting to say but the phone has started to ring,” says Dern of offers he’s getting for work.
“It’s rather pathetic at 77 years old, but it’s true.”