2024-07-15 03:15:12
Jeff Bridges has reflected on his triumphant return to The Old Man, admitting that he didn’t think he’d be able to return for a second season amid his cancer diagnosis. The actor 74 years old, who stars in the thriller Disney + As former CIA agent Dan Chase underwent chemotherapy from non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2020. Although the treatment eradicated the cancer, it left him with a weakened immune system and, in January 2021, Bridges contracted Covid which ended up almost killing him.
“I mean, I didn’t think it was… I thought: “I’m not going back. I won’t be able to go back,” Bridges said to People in a new interview with his co-star John Lithgow. “As for returning to the series, everyone was very considerate of my condition,” she said, noting that she did not remember her return to the set “as being particularly difficult. Even the fight scenes after I returned, I don’t remember being upset by them.”
In the early days, Lithgow, who plays FBI agent Harold Harper, tasked with hunting down Chase, recalled, “We really had to keep an eye on him. Everyone was watching Jeff. Occasionally he needed oxygen. “He was very relaxed,” Lithgow recalls. “He calmed everyone else down. At first, everyone was very alert and nervous, and he calmed everyone down.”
“You just do the best you can, and that’s all you can do. It’s a great thing, actors working with actors, being a brotherhood, a fraternity,” Bridges said. “We look out for each other.” The star of The Big Lebowski He said in an interview with The Independent in 2022 that Covid put his life in danger: “It just kicked my ass… God, it brought up so many different emotions and feelings in me,” he said of going through five weeks in an intensive care unit. “Fear was not one of the strongest. It was above all the feeling of having to follow the program. Here I am, sick, I know that I do not want to die because one of the things that the disease made me see is “how much I like being alive.”
Recalling his brush with death, Bridges called it a “gift.” “I learned things during those moments that I wouldn’t have learned any other way,” he said. “Dig into everything that’s coming at me. That was the concrete thing: dig every little thing. And by dig, I mean, get into it, you know, get into what’s going on in a very rich way. As deep as you can.” The second season of The Old Man premieres with a two-episode special on the first Thursday in September.