Jeff Bridges says he didn’t think he’d be able to return to The Old Man amid cancer journey

‘Everybody was watching Jeff. I mean, he needed oxygen occasionally,’ his co-star John Lithgow recalled

Jeff Bridges has reflected on his triumphant return to The Old Man, admitting that he didn’t think he would be able to come back for a second season amid his cancer diagnosis.

The 74-year-old actor, who leads FX’s thriller as former CIA agent Dan Chase, underwent chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2020. While the treatment eradicated the cancer, it left him with a weakened immune system, and by January 2021, Bridges had caught Covid that ended up nearly killing him.

“I mean, I didn’t think I was ... I thought, ‘I’m not going to come back. I won’t be able to come back,’” Bridges told People in a new interview alongside his co-star John Lithgow.

“As far as being back into the show again, everybody was so considerate about my condition,” he said, noting that he didn’t remember his return to set “as being particularly difficult. Even the fight scenes after I came back, I can’t remember being upset about that.”

In the early days, Lithgow, who stars as FBI agent Harold Harper tasked with hunting down Chase, recalled: “We really had to watch him. Everybody was watching Jeff. I mean, he needed oxygen occasionally.

“He was so relaxed about it,” Lithgow remembered. “He put everybody else at ease. Everyone at first was so watchful and nervous, and [he] just put everyone at ease.”

“You just do your best and that’s all you can do. It’s something so great, actors working with actors, being a fraternity, a sorority,” Bridges said. “You’re looking out for each other.”

Jeff Bridges needed oxygen occasionally in the early days, his co-star John Lithgow recalled (Getty Images)

The Big Lebowski star previously recounted his life-threatening bout of Covid in a 2022 interview with The Independent, saying that “it made cancer look like nothing. It just kicked my ass.”

“God, it brought so many different emotions and feelings,” he said of spending five weeks in an intensive care unit. “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.”

Looking back at his brush with death, Bridges called it a “gift.”

“I learnt things during those times that I wouldn’t have learnt in any other way,” he said. “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.”

The second season of The Old Man premieres with a two-episode special Thursday, September at 10pm ET on FX, with new episodes released weekly after that. All episodes will be available to stream on Hulu the next day.