Jeff Bridges says he thought ‘seriously’ about retiring after health scare

Actor, 72, has previously been candid about ‘dancing with my mortality’ in 2021

Jeff Bridges has revealed that his recent health scare made him question the remainder of his career, admitting that he thought “seriously” about retiring.

While filming his newest thriller series, The Old Man, based on Thomas Perry’s novel of the same name, the 72-year-old Big Lebowski star came “pretty close to dying”.

While recovering from chemotherapy to treat his non-Hodgkins lymphoma, which he had been diagnosed with in 2020, he caught covid and became seriously ill.

“I thought after my illness I didn’t know if I was gonna go back to work,” he told Variety in an interview this week. “I thought I was retiring, very seriously.”

However, he returned to set and finished production, which had been shut down for three months due to the pandemic and his health.

Reflecting again on the possibility of retirement, Bridges said: “You know, my dad he worked right up to the very end. I don’t know, I’m just leaving that up to the way it works out. I’m not sure.”

The Oscar-winning actor leads the FX series as a former CIA operative who becomes involved in an increasingly dangerous cat and mouse chase.

Jeff Bridges in ‘The Old Man' (FX)

His return to television comes decades after his last credit in an episode of 1986’s animated The World of Disney.

He said he “originally resisted doing television” after seeing his father, Lloyd Bridges, who acted in several shows, become “frustrated with how quickly the shows were shot and how they couldn’t pay as much attention to detail”.

“But then I started to watch all this great content that is coming out of the tube these days. And I thought ‘This is something to explore’ and I’m glad I did because I was not disappointed,” Bridges added.

“There was really no differences in making the show than there was movies.”

The Old Man is available to stream on FX in the US and Disney+ internationally.