In The Old Man, Jeff Bridges plays a retired CIA agent forced to flee as his past resurfaces. A particularly physical role for the 72-year-old actor.
Jeff Bridges is well known for starring in hit action films such as Iron Man, Tron Legacy and True Grit during his stellar multi-decade career. He is now the hero of the new thriller series, The Old Man, broadcast on Disney +. He recently confided in the British magazine Express on the challenges of filming the series, after battling lymphoma and Covid.
The actor revealed that his first TV project in years was perhaps his most physically demanding role. Jeff Bridges plays a former CIA agent, Dan Chase, who abandons his lonely life when his old friend and FBI rival, Harold Harper (played by John Lithgow), is tasked with finding him.
A role with particularly impressive bare-knuckle fight scenes because they are not only very long (compared to traditional fight scenes) and rough. “I think I did more fight scenes in this show than in all my movies combined.“, confides Jeff Bridges.
Jeff has worked closely with stuntmen, some of whom he knows well, who work on some of the best action productions available in Hollywood today. “We had amazing stunt supervisors“, he recalled. “Tim Connolly, Henry Kingi Jr. and a stuntman I’ve worked with for years, Thomas DuPont.“
“And they’re… it’s just the cream of the crop. I asked Tim, ‘What’s the best fight scene?’ He said to me: ‘You have already seen Atomic Blonde ?’. And I hadn’t seen it. But you know, the scene where they all come down those stairs like that! I looked at him and thought, ‘I’m in good hands. These guys know what they are doing.“
Atomic Blonde’s stunt team has also worked on the John Wick, Matrix and Marvel movie franchises. After seeing some of the film’s best sequences, including a long, brutal stair fight scene, Jeff Bridges knew he was in good hands on set of The Old Man.
The Old Man is currently available on Disney+.