FACING MORTALITY, ELUDING DEATH

During shooting of his first major TV role, Jeff Bridges had a close call with death — off- and on-screen. But the Dude abides and talks about his latest production

It’s been a tough few years for Oscarwinning actor and everybody’s favourite Dude, Jeff Bridges. In 2019, Bridges, who began his acting career as a child when he made appearances in the 1950s TV show Sea Hawk, which starred his father Lloyd, signed on for his first major TV role in the FX adaptation of Thomas Perry’s bestselling crime thriller The Old Man.

As the 72-year-old Bridges recalls, “My father had done a lot of TV shows and I could see his frustration with the short amount of time you needed to execute what you had to do, but there was such wonderful television coming out these days that I said, ‘I’d better explore this.’ So I met [show creators Jonathan Steinberg and Robert Levine] and they told me what they were up to and what their approach was going to be like and I said, ‘This looks like something that I can do — this could be wonderful,’ and then as they started to gather the team ... I said, ‘This is something that I want to do’.”

The supporting cast includes veteran actor John Lithgow, comedy actress

Alia Shawkat and TV stalwart Amy Brenneman. Bridges plays Dan Chase, the old man of the title and a former CIA agent who, when we first encounter him, is living alone after the death of his wife with only his two devoted Rottweilers for company as he battles what he fears are the first signs of dementia. When Chase’s 30-year off-the-grid existence is rudely and violently disrupted by the arrival of an assassin, he and his dogs are forced to hit the road and go into hiding as he realises that a man from his CIA past is hell-bent on exacting revenge for something Chase did decades ago.

The show was more than halfway through shooting when the pandemic shut down production in March 2020. Then when it resumed later that year, the production and Bridges were dealt another terrible blow when he announced in October 2020 that he had been diagnosed with lymphoma.

As Brenneman remembers, “Jeff is a very communicative person and throughout his cancer we would FaceTime once in a while and I could always tell where he was in the treatment because if he’d had his steroids he’d have a lot of energy.”

But on January 6 last year, the day of the Capitol insurrection in Washington, Brenneman and Lithgow received a message from Bridges telling them he’d had a PET scan and the results seemed to be promising. Brenneman says she “sent him a picture and he didn’t respond; that’s when he was battling Covid, which was a different thing to the cancer and he said that’s what really tested him”. By September last year Bridges had successfully beaten both Covid and cancer and production finally resumed with everyone relieved that its beloved star was fighting fit and eager to return.

Bridges admits that after his health scares he now feels like an old man. “I certainly feel older than I was a couple of years ago before I went through all these health adventures. It’s funny, you know, when I think what I’ve been through health-wise, it’s made me more of who I already was.

“When you face your mortality the way I did, you pull out all your stops; you think of all the philosophies you’ve lived by, your spirituality, all your strategies for how you’ve addressed other problems in your life and you say, ‘Come on guys, now’s the time, tell me what I need to do.’ You get to exercise all of those aspects of yourself. You become deeper; — an older version of myself — deeper, steeped — like a wellsteeped tea or something,” he says in endearing “The Dude abides” wisdom.

At the premiere of the show in Los Angeles last week, Bridges and his co-stars strode the red carpet looking elated and trying their best to outshine their Rottweiler co-stars wearing their doggy tuxedos, stealing most of the limelight.

Shawkat says it was a great experience to watch the first episode on the big screen. “The show really suits it; it’s so cinematic. Directed by John Watts, it has an amazing style to it, the lighting is beautiful so it was really satisfying in the theatre. We had our families there. The action sequences, especially, because it’s such a slow build that when there’ sa crash or a bang, all of a sudden were so jarring. Your heart rate goes up. I was even surprised ... I knew what was happening but it was a shock to see it big like that. I wish more television series were shown that way.”

Brenneman agrees: “The show does the grittiness and the exhaustion of these fights so beautifully. There’s an exciting moment that feels like that’s a jump scare, and then the slow grinds of bodies trying to overtake one another and Jeff looking like a badass in one moment and a thousand years old the next. There’s nothing romantic, there’s nothing predictable, there are just bodies crunching and trying to overcome one another and it’s gross and great.”

For Bridges, whose first experience in a long-form drama series has certainly been one to remember, sometimes for the wrong reasons, working on The Old Man reminded him of his father who, unlike many actors, encouraged his sons to take up the craft, and approached his work with the belief that what they we’re doing is fun.

“That made us relaxed and we could enjoy it and some of our best performances could come about. A lot of actors approach making movies the same way: we only have a certain amount of time to do what we have to do, let’s get to know each other, let’s get as intimate as we can and relax and say, ‘What we’re doing is fun’.”

Bridges is also thankful that the experience allowed him to work with Brenneman and Lithgow. “They’re wonderful actors and approach their jobs in the same way. What becomes evident is how quickly we can get down to working together when people say, ‘Let’s get down to it, man. Let’s see what we got. Let’s jam.’ It’s like playing music in a band same thing.”

*The first three episodes of The Old

Man are now streaming on Disney +. New episodes are added weekly on Thursdays.