After a rough ride over the last few years, the 72-year-old is back on our screens in Disney Plus’s ‘The Old Man’. And it’s not what he expected
Jeff Bridges as ‘The Dude’ in the Coen Brothers’ ‘The Big Lebowski’. Photo: Polygram Film Entertainment
’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) 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 he was a teenager, when he was taught how to box by his actor brother Beau (“That ended when I knocked him out one day in our garage”).
