Playing ‘The Old Man’ takes fresh eyes. Just ask Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow

On FX’s series The Old Man, Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow play frenemies of a sort – men who worked together and clashed in the intelligence world, eventually compelled to join forces.

But in real life, watching the two actors trade quips and stories sitting next to each other, the chemistry of their friendship is palpable – especially when Bridges describes how a cancer diagnosis and COVID left him wondering if he might live long enough to finish filming the show’s first season a few years ago.

“I didn’t think I was going to make it,” Bridges says, his trademark, light-hearted attitude growing serious for a moment. “Slowly but surely, I put little goals in front of myself… it was a big goal walking my daughter Hayley down the wedding aisle [in 2022]…I kind of trained like it was almost a sporting event.”

Lithgow says Bridges’ email updates during that time weren’t so encouraging. But he always had faith his co-star would find a way back.

“Something in me thought, well, this show is exactly what he needs,” Lithgow adds. “He needs that ‘hay in the stable.’ He needs something to really work for and fight for, because he really loves this show.”

Lithgow also admits a slightly selfish reason for wanting to see Bridges return to finish work on the first season and tackle a second one. “If you recall, he and I barely got to work together [in the first season],” Lithgow says. “I thought, ‘Dammit Bridges, you’re going to get back here and you’re going to act with me. You’re the reason I wanted to do this show.’”

A buddy drama centered on fatherhood

Indeed, the show’s second season is something of an oddball, buddy drama, in which Bridges’ Dan Chase – a retired CIA operative – finds an old ally-turned-adversary has kidnapped his adult daughter, Emily, played by Alia Shawkat.

Chase is forced to team up with Lithgow’s former FBI deputy director Harold Harper, who once mentored Emily – even though Harper tried to chase down and kill Chase in the first season. These uneasy allies travel to Afghanistan to rescue Emily, forced to confront their own troubled histories with each other and her.

“What comes to my mind is love,” Bridges says. “You think of fathers loving their daughters. Love isn’t all cupcakes and valentines and stuff. There’s a dark side to love…interestingly woven into the story.”

Sounding like the world’s biggest theater kid, Lithgow compares Emily’s divided loyalties to storylines in the musical Mamma Mia!, while acknowledging their show features some of the most dysfunctional father figures on television.

“One of them plotted to assassinate the other, the other found out about it, acknowledged why it had to happen and basically said…let’s move on,” Lithgow says, laughing. “They both know, because they’re in this hair-raising profession, what each of them is capable of.”

Bridges sees it as a balancing act for men devoted to a cause and willing to do whatever it takes to pursue it. “You’re talking about extreme characters…To be a spy and be in this business, you have to have, on one hand ruthlessness, but on the other hand, empathy. And that’s something I think all of us can relate to. We all have egos and we all have compassion – and how we dance with the two…it’s intriguing.”

Exploring and redefining the “old man” figure

Watching Bridges navigate fight scenes in The Old Man, it’s tough to imagine he was ever ill while filming it. Chase takes on assassins and spies half his age with skill and ferocity, showing that age doesn’t necessarily equal weakness or passivity.

One reason the show resonates differently: while each of their characters could be considered the titular “Old Man” – characters struggling with regret, aging, fatherhood and family in different ways – in real life, Bridges and Lithgow also seem to embody the freedom and challenges some performers have found by embracing their age in Hollywood.

But suggest that they might be defining how to age gracefully in show business, and Lithgow, at age 78, demurs. “You’d be surprised how little deciding is involved in an actor’s career,” he adds. “You wait for people to want you and…they have to want you for very specific reasons. Well, they have wanted me to play a bunch of old men…It turns out they need a lot of old men and there aren’t a lot of old men around.”

Over the years, Lithgow’s shown lots of range: from playing a transgender ex-football player in the Oscar-nominated film The World According to Garp to inhabiting an undercover alien in the sitcom 3rd Rock From the Sun. But more recently, he’s gained acclaim playing older figures like Winston Churchill in The Crown, Fox News’ Roger Ailes in the film Bombshell and King Lear onstage.

“You spend a lot of your career hoping people don’t notice you’re growing old, or wanting to look younger,” he says. “And now, half the parts I’ve played, I’m playing older men than I am, because I still have the strength to do it.”

At age 74, Bridges is a bit more philosophical, saying the challenges with memory that can come with aging also have an upside. “There’s a freshness to old age, like ‘How do I do this?’” he says, a bit of wonder tinging his voice. “You don’t really know what you’re capable of doing, until you’re tested. If life calls you to do it, well, let’s find out…here I go.”

And did that feeling of being tested extend to the way Bridges survived COVID and cancer? “The gift of all those things you’re afraid of that are going to happen to you…they are gifts, and you don’t realize it until you live through it,” he says, noting that he was surprised by his own reaction to the diagnosis when it was dire.

“When I was told, ‘I don’t know if you’re going to make it,’ that kind of thing; I wasn’t that afraid,” Bridges adds. “I feel I’d be more afraid of doing a scene and not pulling it off.”