‘I learnt to dig every little thing’: Jeff Bridges on...

The ‘Big Lebowski’ star talks to Patrick Smith about his 70-year acting career and being ‘afraid’ of making movies. Oh well, as casting, that’s pretty good,” Jeff Bridges thought, when he was offered the lead in a drama called The Old Man. “I certainly qualify.” But the 72-year-old star of The Big Lebowski and The Fabulous Baker Boys was in for a rude awakening when its plot became clear. “Man, in my whole career I don’t think I’ve done as much fighting as I have on this,” he tells me, that honeyed Californian-hippie drawl unmistakeable. “It was gruelling, but a lot of fun.”.

Image Credit: The Independent [No country for old man: Jeff Bridges in ‘The Old Man’, out now on Disney+]

In fact, the FX series (on Disney Plus in the UK) about a former CIA agent on a hit list turns into a balletic, bone-cracking cross between Homeland, John Wick and last year’s dementia drama The Father. In real life, Bridges hadn’t fought since “grammar school”, although he was taught how to box by his actor brother Beau – “That ended when I knocked him out one day in our garage.”.

Image Credit: The Independent [Tying the room together: Bridges as ‘The Dude’ in the Coens’ left-brained neo-noir ‘The Big Lebowski’]

But for Bridges – as for his character – the show was about to become a battle to survive. “The big fight scene in the first episode... during that, I had a nine-by-12-inch tumour in my body, a mass in my stomach getting punched around like that and I wasn’t even aware of it,” he says. “And it’s amazing when I look at that thing again. God, it was just remarkable.”.

Image Credit: The Independent [Cybill Shepherd and Bridges in Peter Bogdanovich’s ‘The Last Picture Show’]

It wasn’t until the production took an enforced break for Covid, though, that he knew something was really wrong. “I had a CAT scan: I had felt, like, a bone in my stomach where a bone wasn’t supposed to be, and I thought I better get that checked out.” That’s when Bridges discovered he had non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He quickly began chemotherapy to shrink the large tumour – “They got a cocktail that worked, and oh man it worked fast. That thing just imploded,” he told a reporter. But just as his prognosis was looking up, in January 2021, with his immune system obliterated, he caught Covid on a local hospital ward. It nearly killed him, he says – those five weeks in an intensive care unit “made the cancer look like nothing. It just kicked my ass.”.