Turns out you can teach an old Dude new tricks, if the trailer for Disney+’s thriller series The Old Man is to be believed. It shows us a beardy yet lean-looking Jeff Bridges getting his turn as a John Wick-style, vengeful operative, shootin’ guns and releasin’ gnarly dogs onto his enemies.
Season one of The Old Man is now streaming on Disney+, with new episodes still being released. Apparently the show opens with an extended gag about Bridges’ frequent urination, something we never saw Wick or Bond or any of those young guns have to deal with.
Bridges and his co-star John Lithgow spoke very warmly about the production of the series and their instantaneous connection in a piece for the New York Times. When the series was halted due to Bridges’ stomach cancer and then a near-death bout with COVID, it only brought the co-leads closer together. Lithgow says that “in a sense, our working relationship unfolded the same way the series does. It was such a payoff, and it was so worth waiting for.”
Lithgow plays Harper, a dogged FBI pursuer of Bridges’ Dan Chase. They’re brought violently back together long after Chase’s CIA past in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Old Man has since been living off the grid in the desert with just his cute/terrifying pair of pups for company, so the readjustment to knuckle-dusting action and intrigue should be a tricky one. “You have no idea what I did, who I was”, he warns new love interest Amy Brenneman below.
Another recognisable face in the trailer is Alia Shawkat, who defends Bridges’ grizzled vengeance by pointing out that “the US government which he has dedicated his life to turned its back on him.” Wow, the US causing irrevocable damage in foreign countries and then ditching the veterans it sent off to do the dirty work…could that actually happen?!
Over the first season’s seven action-packed episodes, we’ll get to see the full extent of Lithgow’s anxieties about Bridges: “There’s no limit to the damage he’ll do, or the things he’ll destroy.” Sounds a lot less zen than Bridges’ eternally lovely turn as The Dude, then.
Whether he’s bowling or cracking skulls, we’re just very happy to have Bridges back onscreen after that pair of health scares—he wasn’t sure whether he could even dance at his daughter’s wedding without oxygen, and now here he is taking names and looking like a total killer.
