Jeff Bridges gives health update as ‘The Old Man’ returns

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Jeff Bridges hadn’t appeared on the small-screen since he was a teen when his dad invited him to guest star on his TV drama Sea Hunt and his eponymously named The Lloyd Bridges Show back in the 1960s.

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But when he was offered a starring role on FX’s spy thriller The Old Man, he couldn’t resist.

“I keep trying to retire,” Bridges, 74, chuckles in a Zoom interview. “I think about it all the time. My strategy in making movies is I try to resist it. I don’t want to do movies because I know what it takes. It’s not just the hard work, it’s time away from my family and all this other stuff I like to do. I spend a lot of time resisting things that I’m offered. So the things that I end up doing, like The Old Man, are things I resisted, but … it became too intriguing to resist and I get sucked into that.”

In Bridges’ first recurring television role in more than 60 years, the Oscar winner plays Dan Chase, a retired CIA operative living off the grid who is drawn out of retirement when an old enemy from his past resurfaces looking for revenge.

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First announced in 2019, the action-packed series, which co-stars John Lithgow as Chase’s old handler, Harold Harper, and Alia Shawkat as Dan’s government agent daughter Emily, was shooting when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and filming was halted. Shooting hit a snag again when Bridges announced he was diagnosed with lymphoma in October 2020. He says he was “at death’s door” when he contracted COVID while undergoing chemotherapy.

With his cancer in remission, Bridges says it’s “wonderful to be back” as The Old Man ahead of its second season return this week on FX and Disney+.

As the action picks up on the series, which is created by Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine and based on the novel by Thomas Perry, Chase and Harper team up to rescue his daughter after she’s kidnapped in Afghanistan.

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Bridges says he’s “feeling great now,” but marveled at his ability to film some of his fight scenes during the first season. “I look at Season 1, now, and some of those fight scenes make me wince. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had a 9-by-12 inch tumour growing in my stomach from lymphoma. I was doing all those fight scenes and getting hit in the stomach and I didn’t even know it,” he says.

With The Old Man back on the small screen, Bridges spoke about his long overdue return to television, being the product of nepotism and why The Dude — the role he made famous in 1998’s The Big Lebowski — still abides.

We had to wait until the last episode of Season 1 to see you and John Lithgow share a scene. What was it like to get together with him in Season 2?

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We had a wonderful time. We both come from showbiz families so we have a lot in common. But we approach the work in the same way. We’re both pretty open guys and we try to give as much love and compassion to everybody around us. That seems to work as far as being friends.

When I think of all the cool characters you’ve played, Dan Chase is right up there among the best of them. What was it about him that clicked with you?

I was fascinated by the CIA spy aspect. We had a guy who was our technical adviser, Christopher Huddleston, who was a former CIA agent. I got to find out some amazing things, but the one thing we had in common was the fact that we are both actors. CIA, spies, they’re probably the best actors in the world. They’re acting for their lives, so I could relate to the job of playing Dan Chase in that respect. But poor Dan, he’s played so many characters for so long, he doesn’t know who the hell he is (laughs).

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Was TV something you wanted to get into?

My father, Lloyd Bridges, was in several TV series and I saw how hard he worked and also how disappointed he was that it was TV and not the movies. In the movies, there was a greater concentration on detail and everything was better quality. But today, that’s not the case. You have (shows) like Succession that are so well done and there’s great people doing them and the quality is so spectacular … This feels like I’m making a movie. The quality is top notch.

The thing I like about this show is you don’t know what’s going to happen to these characters. Do you have an ideal ending for Dan Chase?

That’s the thing, man. That’s the big difference between movies and TV. A TV series, well this particular series, is like life. We don’t know where it’s going (laughs). I certainly don’t, but Jon Steinberg, our writer and show runner, he doesn’t know all the specifics either. You get surprises when you watch it; as an actor, I get surprises when I find out what my character is going to do.

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I loved you in films like The Fisher King, Tucker: The Man and his Dream, Fearless, Starman and Tron. I also loved you in Crazy Heart and I remembered how much I liked your Oscar speech back in 2010. What was it like growing up around a showbiz family and having this kind of career?

Man, it’s like a wild dream. I was so fortunate to be born into the bed I was born into. I had such wonderful folks. I’m the product of nepotism. I guess that’s not too unusual; a guy’s dad’s making shoes, it’s not too unusual to think his son’s going to grow up to be a shoemaker. But I’m so fortunate … and the movies you rattled off. One of the things that I’ve done since Starman is take photos with this funny looking camera called a Widelux and I make gifts, books of those photographs for the cast and crew. I get to look at those books and it brings me right back to those moments.

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The Big Lebowski turned 26 this year. Does the longevity of that movie surprise you? You must get people yelling out lines from that every single day.

That movie is certainly one of my favourites. The Coen brothers know how to make movies. I can’t think of another movie I’ve done where it has manifested in these different (ways). You have Lebowski Fest, and that goes on for days; there was a book I wrote with a friend called The Dude and the Zen Master, there was another book called Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, it was as if Shakespeare wrote the screenplay. So there’s all these offshoots. But I’m happy I was a part of telling that story.

Did you imagine it would have that kind of sustained success?

No … I knew it was funny. But when it first came out, it didn’t do that well. People didn’t seem to get it. It had to be a hit overseas before it made a splash back over here.

Season 2 of FX’s The Old Man premieres on Thursday, Sept. 12 at 10pm ET/PT on FX, and streams the next day (Friday, Sept. 13) on Disney+ in Canada.

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