‘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

Jeff Bridges: ‘When I look at my performances as an eight-year-old, it makes me cringe’ (Getty)

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

Was he scared? “God, it brought so many different emotions and feelings,” he says. “Fear wasn’t a real strong one. It was mainly kind of the feeling of getting with the programme, you know. Here I am, I’m sick, I know I don’t want to die because one of the things that the illness brought to my attention is how much I love being alive...” He trails off. “What was your question again? Oh yeah, it was not so much fear as me being pissed off. My big thing was I’d be in this bed, and I had that thing up my nose, and oxygen, and if I wanted to turn over, I would have to call the nurse. She’d say, ‘We’re turning up your oxygen, OK? Now are you ready to turn?’ I’d go like this” – he theatrically demonstrates for me – “and the state of not being able to breathe is just bizarre. So just to roll over in bed onto my side being a 15-minute process – that was a pain in the ass.”

Bridges speaks expansively in mellow tones, his sentences punctuated by paroxysms of high-pitched giggles. Beamed into my living room from his home in Santa Barbara, he is a picture of blissed-out bonhomie, with a deep fund of anecdotes and a tendency to clench his fists together or rest his hands behind his head for long periods. Sitting in a leather recliner, he’s wearing glasses and a black oversized T-shirt; his grey hair is combed back. He has a great beard.

Swivelling his screen round, Bridges is keen to show me his garage. There are rugs. Ceramics. Bridges’ own paintings. Framed photos of his family. In the corner, some musical equipment. “I turned the garage into my little cave,” he says proudly. “This is where I spent my recovery time when I was sick. It was the easiest place to roll the bed in and hook me up on all the oxygen I needed. I got used to being here, so this is where I hang out.”

No country for old man: Jeff Bridges in ‘The Old Man’, out now on Disney+ (FX)

That grim combination of cancer and Covid, says Bridges, “exacerbated all these feelings of love for my wonderful family”: his wife Sue, their three adult daughters and several grandchildren. He became adamant he would walk his youngest daughter, Hayley, down the aisle. “The first goal was how long can I stand up,” he says, “and my record was 45 seconds, that’s how long I could stand up. And then it was, how many steps can I take? Oh good. Now I’m going to walk down the hall – all this with oxygen, of course.” He worked with a trainer; every day the walks got longer. “Finally, one day I said, ‘Maybe I can do it, you know.’ And it turns out I not only got to walk her down the aisle, but I got to do the wedding dance [to Ray Charles’s “Ain’t That Love”]. That was terrific.”

In some respects, his brush with death was a “gift”. “I learnt things during those times that I wouldn’t have learnt in any other way,” he explains. Like what? “Oh, well, to dig, man. Dig it all as it’s coming at me. That was the specific thing: dig every little thing. And by dig, I mean, get into it, you know, get into what’s happening in a very rich way, you know. As deeply as you can.”

To dig it: no wonder the Coens wrote the character of “The Dude” in The Big Lebowski with him in mind. Called “the Zen-est of all actors” by his friend the musician T Bone Burnett – the actor is deeply into Buddhism and very fond of meditation – Bridges will be indelibly tied to this shambling, white-russian-guzzling hippie who shuffles around the Coens’ cult 1998 crime caper in a bathrobe, joint on the go. (Bridges tells me the film’s most-quoted line back to him is, “Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man”, but his own favourite is, “Sometimes you eat the bar, and... sometimes the bar, well, he eats you”. Whole internet threads have been devoted to the meaning of it, as delivered by Sam Elliott with what is surely an unusual pronunciation of “bear”; it’s not hard to imagine The Dude puzzling over it into the early hours.) There have been so many roles, though, as he gradually transformed from a puppyish, crinkly eyed boy next door to a hard-bitten old-timer, his face a grizzled canvas of weathered wisdom and brusque intensity.

Tying the room together: Bridges as ‘The Dude’ in the Coens’ left-brained neo-noir ‘The Big Lebowski’ (Universal)

Bridges began his screen career early. Born within sight of the Hollywood sign to actors Lloyd Bridges and Dorothy Dean, he first showed up as a baby in the 1951 parolee melodrama The Company She Keeps, alongside his mum and his elder brother Beau (middle brother Garrett died of sudden infant death syndrome shortly before Jeff was born). Their father, a star of B-movies and a supporting actor in major films, was briefly a member of the Communist Party and was blacklisted from Hollywood for three years in the McCarthy era. But he managed to rebuild his career with two hit shows, Sea Hunt and drama anthology The Lloyd Bridges Show, both of which saw the young Jeff making irregular TV appearances. “My dad really encouraged all his kids go into acting,” says Bridges. “But when I look at my performances as an eight-year-old in Sea Hunt, it makes me cringe. My awkward teenage years, too. That was a weird period. I’m not too enamoured of myself at that age, so that’s kind of embarrassing.”

After completing his military service in the Coast Guard, Bridges moved to New York to study drama, before getting his big break in cinema, aged 21, as a small-town Texas jock pining for Cybill Shepherd’s heartbreaker in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show. The role, earning Bridges his first of seven Oscar nominations, would set the template for the characters he’d inhabit over the next decade: everyman types notable for their innocence and decency, but also a little damaged and down on their luck.

Cybill Shepherd and Bridges in Peter Bogdanovich’s ‘The Last Picture Show’ (Columbia/Kobal/Shutterstock)

Bridges worked again with Bogdanovich for the sequel to The Last Picture Show, 1990’s Texasville, and the pair remained close friends right up until the writer-director’s death in January. “We were talking on the phone and meeting each other for dinner,” says Bridges. “We had a great relationship. What a master filmmaker.” There’s a lengthy pause before he turns the tables.

“Have you seen a lot of his films?” he asks.

I say yes, wondering if he is going to ask me about one I haven’t. He is.

“What was the name of that movie with Ryan O’Neal? My memory... I don’t know if it’s age or Covid...”

Is it What’s Up, Doc?, I ask.

“No, no. What’s Up, Doc? is nothing. Well, there is something good in there. But no, it’s the one with Ryan O’Neal’s daughter. She won an Oscar... Paper Moon, yes. I love that film. What a masterpiece.”

You talk about fear. I’m more afraid of making movies than I was in the hospital

Between The Last Picture Show and Texasville, Bridges found himself working with Hollywood stalwarts such as John Huston (in boxing drama Fat City in 1972) and Clint Eastwood (in Michael Cimino’s Oscar-nominated 1974 crime caper Thunderbolt and Lightfoot). Bridges remembers being heartened by the experience of being around “these old pros”. “Huston I got to work with twice, and it was quite a different experience each time. But Clint was like, when your heroes don’t put themselves up on a pedestal, and let you know that they’re just a struggling human being like you.”

Amazingly, although Bridges had been nominated for an Academy Award in the early Seventies, he still hadn’t decided whether to commit to a full-time career in acting. “As I told you, my father really encouraged me,” he explains, “but who wants to do what their parents want them to do?” Then the opportunity to play an alcoholic young drifter in John Frankenheimer’s four-hour adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh came along, “with Robert Ryan and Lee Marvin. These massive talents. And I turned it down for a while, before saying, ‘Well, I’m going to do this as an experiment. It might be the final nail in my acting coffin, you know... if this turns me on or turns me off, this will be a good test for me.’ It turned out it was a very unusual experience in many ways. It was eight weeks of hanging out with these old masters, you know. And I saw how anxious they were, and how desperately they wanted to do it well, and the material was so important, and how they all struggled with that. You talk about fear. I’m more afraid of making movies than I was in the hospital.”

Shooting to kill: Bridges as Rooster Cogburn in the Coen brothers’ adaptation of ‘True Grit’ (Paramount)

Hollywood must have changed a lot since the Seventies, I say. “Gosh, well, it was pretty simple back then: you’d read the script, make the movie, people would come to the theatres,” he says. “But now, with this web 3.0 and blockchain and crypto and, my God, there’s so much content.” He suddenly lights up, excited, and asks me if I’m “hip” to PEN15, the excruciatingly funny school comedy in which a pair of thirtysomething friends play versions of their young teenage selves. “Isn’t it great? Those ladies. I was so impressed with the acting.”

He picks up his original thought. “It’s not so much how movies are made, but how they’re received. Now they’re on your TV.” He pauses. “I hope that the idea of movie theatres doesn’t completely evaporate, because there’s something about being in that dark room with a bunch of strangers going through an experience together that I kind of miss.”

Michelle Pfeiffer with Jeff Bridges (right) and Beau Bridges (left) in ‘The Fabulous Baker Boys’ (ITV/Shutterstock)

It’s little wonder he feels this way. Picture him in John Carpenter’s gentle 1984 sci-fi story Starman, or the Coens’ elegiac, sumptuously shot western True Grit (2010), or the soulful weepie Crazy Heart (2009), for which a rumbled, restrained Bridges won his only Academy Award to date as a washed-out country singer. To not see these films on the big screen would have once been considered sacrilege. Of course, he also played a villain in 2008’s Iron Man, the bombastic, effects-laden early entry in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe. Bridges is “surprised” at just how successful the Marvel films have been. “I am very biased,” he adds, “but I think ours was the best one.” Does he agree with Martin Scorsese’s view, expressed to Empire magazine in 2019, that superhero franchise movies are “not cinema”? “I think there is room for both,” he says, concisely.

As happens often during our conversation, we drift back to family. Specifically, his. Bridges met Sue in 1974, when he was filming Rancho Deluxe in Montana; she was working at a guest ranch where the movie was shot. They’ve now been married 45 years. Bridges once described the secret of a long marriage as “not getting divorced”. I mention that it’s something most Hollywood couples fail at. He laughs. He knows it. “It keeps getting better and better, more intense and beautiful. It’s wild. Still here with my girlfriend.” Bridges pushes his fists together again and lets out that characteristically gruff squeal. “Wow,” he beams, “that’s amazing.”

‘The Old Man’ is available to stream now on Disney Plus