Jeff Bridges revealed this week that he believes he was “pretty close to dying” last year, after contracting COVID-19. Bridges, who’s now 72, gave a brief update on his health to People, noting that a combination of chemotherapy and COVID left him “dancing with my mortality.”
Specifically, Bridges related that he was especially susceptible to the disease, which has killed roughly 1 million people in the United States over the last 2 years, due to treatment for the cancer he’d been diagnosed with back in October of 2020. On the plus side, Bridges’ lymphoma responded well to an aggressive regimen of chemotherapy; on the negative, the damage the treatment did to his immune system left him far more susceptive to COVID when he contracted it in January of 2021.
Per the People piece, Bridges says he spent five months in the hospital last year, unable to even roll over in bed without assistance from a nurse and the use of an oxygen tank. “I had no defenses,” Bridges said. “That’s what chemo does—it strips you of all your immune system. I had nothing to fight it. COVID made my cancer look like nothing.”
“The doctors kept telling me, ‘Jeff, you’ve got to fight. You’re not fighting,’” Bridges added. “I was in surrender mode.”
Bridges eventually recovered from his long bout with the disease; his cancer is also reported to be in remission. Which explains why he’s out here giving interviews to People, of course: He’s promoting his new FX TV series The Old Man, in which he plays a former CIA operative who lives off the grid in an effort to keep out of reach of his former espionage associates. You can watch the trailer for the series, which co-stars John Lithgow as the FBI official hunting Bridges down, right here.
