‘I learnt to dig every little thing’: Jeff Bridges on cancer, the Coens, and the Covid that nearly killed him 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 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.
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.”.
“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.
