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 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”). But now he found himself in a battle to survive – and not just in the show. “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.”
