Jeff Bridges Recalls Struggle with Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma During ‘The Old Man’ (Exclusive)

Warning: This post contains spoilers from the season 2 finale of FX’s The Old Man.

Jeff Bridges’ life-threatening health struggles didn’t get in the way of his powerhouse performance portraying a former CIA operative on The Old Man.

In a recent interview with PEOPLE, the actor, 74, discussed the show’s season 2 finale, which aired Thursday, Oct. 24, and reflected on the health obstacles he overcame during production of the FX drama.  

In The Old Man’s climactic finale episode of the season, lives hung in the balance. Marion (Janet McTeer) was using Harold (John Lithgow) as a pawn to get access to Angela, né Parwana (Alia Shawkat), Dan (Bridges) was tortured and left for dead before being nursed back to health by Zoe (Amy Brenneman). Meanwhile, in the final moments, Angela — now owning her recently-discovered roots as Faraz Hamzad’s (Navid Negahban) estranged daughter — demands a favor from Dan: she wants to know about one of Dan’s previous identities, although it’s unclear why that particular alias still has huge sway decades later.

“The whole plot, it just gets thicker and thicker,” Bridges, 74, tells PEOPLE, adding, “Dan, who has so-called saved his daughter now gets the tables flipped on him and she’s capturing him basically. His world is being totally turned upside down.”

Bridges points to a valuable lesson he learned from real-life CIA operative Christopher Huddleston, whom the actor consulted for his complex role: a four-step decision-making model called OODA (Observe, Orientate, Decide, Act).

“The guy who can repeat those fastest kind of wins,” the actor explains. “So he’s [Dan] got a challenge of observing what’s happening. ‘My daughter, oh, she’s got these cards. What am I going to do? Am I going to run? I’ve got to decide. … And then act. And then do what you’ve decided to do and do it as quickly as possible. In this instance, he’s got to go with the flow.”

Onscreen, it looks as though Bridges has mostly gone with the flow — giving a knock-out performance as the multi-alias ex-spy on The Old Man for two seasons — but behind-the-scenes the actor bravely struggled with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a form of blood cancer, which he publicly disclosed on X in October 2020.

After returning home from a trip to Montana in 2020 with his wife Susan Geston — months after filming intense fight scenes for season 1 of The Old Man and after the show went on hiatus due to COVID pandemic restrictions — a doctor’s check-up revealed he had a large stomach tumor.

“God, looking back on those, I really winced because I didn’t know it at the time, but I had a 9 by 12 inch tumor in my stomach — 9 by 12 inch! — while I’m getting smacked around and punched in the stomach and stuff,” he recalls. “Didn’t hurt. There was no pain. But then I had this long hiatus [from filming].”  

Bridges underwent chemotherapy during the hiatus and even contracted COVID, which further compromised his health. It was an extremely trying period the actor admits, leaving him wondering then whether he would live and whether he was “even going to do a season 2″ of The Old Man.

“While I was sick, I thought I not only wouldn’t go back to The Old Man, I thought I might just kick the bucket. It got down to that,” he acknowledges.

“I remember one doctor said, ‘You got to fight, Jeff. You’re not fighting,” Bridges adds. “And I had no idea what he was talking about. I was in surrender mode, just, ‘Everybody dies. This might be me doing that.’ And out of that surrender, like I say, all of this intense love surfaced, and maybe that’s what caused me to survive, I don’t know. But I didn’t relate to the fighting thing, more of a surrendering.”

His treatments paired with intensive physical therapy also eventually helped Bridges get back to fighting form. With the help of a physical therapist, the two set a “little goal” for the actor to be healthy enough to walk his daughter Hayley, 39, down the aisle for her wedding.

“I didn’t know how I could do that, but I said, ‘Well, let’s train. Let’s put that as our goal,’” he says. “So we worked on that. And turned out not only did I walk her down the aisle, but I got to do the wedding dance with her. Then I’d rush to my table and put my oxygen on!”

Going into season 2 of The Old Man, Bridges’ tumor was reduced to the size of a marble, and now, with the season finale behind him, his oncologist emphasizes the actor has made remarkable progress.

“I don’t know the exact size of it. I get MRIs and all that down the line, but my oncologist says, ‘You’re looking good, man.’ And I get all my blood tests and everything and everything’s going real well,” he says, adding that his “fascinating” health journey has taught him a few crucial lessons.

“All of your strategies for life, how you work — all of those get heightened,” he continues. “And love, that’s the word that comes to mind. To see how much I love my family and my friends and the nurses and doctors that were caring for me, and how much love is coming at me. So it just exacerbated love, basically.”

Turning back to The Old Man, there are several unanswered questions left by the season 2 finale, including what will become of Harold, and why is Dan’s old alias so key to Angela’s international agenda? Bridges is unsurprisingly enigmatic, but he offers an answer that’s clearly been influenced by his health struggles.

“It’s like life with these TV series, especially this one, the showrunner is in charge,” he says, referring to executive producer Jonathan E. Steinberg. “He gives me little inklings about what’s going to happen, but I don’t know until I’m reading the script. And so that’s the assignment on this thing. You don’t have it all clear. It’s very much like life, you don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m just in it.”

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The Old Man is available to stream on Hulu.