Jeff Bridges warms to the surprise element of 'The Old Man'

Considering “The Old Man” is built on secrets, it’s amazing Jeff Bridges is its star.

“I’m a terrible secret keeper,” the Oscar winner confesses. “When I find out some information about the show, I really want to tell Sue, my wife, about it. But she said, ‘No, I’m watching it,’ so I can’t tell her everything that goes down.”

In the second season, there’s so much that happens – particularly to Bridges’ character, a former CIA operative – he’d be alerting her every time he picks up a script.

That “learn as you go” strategy is one he enjoys. “Normally, when you get a script, you look at it and you say, ‘Oh, this is setting up this down the line.’ Now, we don’t really know the setups,” he says. “You’ll go, ‘Oh, it’s interesting. I was setting up this thing that I didn’t even know about, but it’s happening now.’ It was very unintentional, but life is that way, too.”

Amy Brenneman, who plays Zoe, his character’s friend, is all too familiar with television’s twists and turns. “It happens all the time,” the “NYPD Blue” veteran says. “I have a brother?”

“Amy’s much more experienced, but, for me, it’s very, very refreshing,” Bridges says. “I went into this with a lot of trepidation. When I started out, it was always movies – they were more important and better done and so forth. My father, Lloyd Bridges, who had several hit series, was disappointed (with the medium) because it was kind of rushed and it didn’t give the quality. But then I started to see some of the great product coming out of television and I said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, man…check it out.’ I’m glad I did because it’s proven that it’s no different than making movies.”

The one wrinkle? Television often has different directors for each episode. “I’ve dug every one of them,” Bridges says.

The format also lets the actors see their characters over a period of time. Ordered in 2019, “The Old Man” shut down production in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It restarted in late 2020 and then Bridges was diagnosed with lymphoma. While in cancer treatment, he contracted COVID-19 and fought for almost five weeks. When he finally returned to the series in 2022, he was ready.

Now as the second season airs, the actors get to celebrate a notable amount of time together.

“I like when people stay together for a while,” Brenneman says. “Almost every movie or play is a finite thing. And it’s very hard to reassemble just because of life being life. But companies in television exist over time. We always joke that we’ve known each other for five years. The fall of Afghanistan was during the shooting of this. So, the world keeps happening and we’re sort of dialoguing with it in an interesting way.”

Bridges’ character, an Afghanistan veteran, has been living off the grid in Vermont for 30 years. He's pulled back into the fray when an FBI agent, played by John Lithgow, is called in to apprehend him.

While playing scenes together during the first season, Bridges and Lithgow had plenty of war stories to share. “We both come from showbiz families,” Bridges says, “and, just generally, actors open their hearts to each other and become friends. We leaned into it.”

“A healthy actor will do that,” Brenneman adds. “Because John and Jeff are so healthy as humans, they’re happy people and they have a nice bond. There are no power trips. Day players come in and wonder, ‘What’s it going to be like?’ and it’s so warm you realize it’s not like we’re on eggshells with one another. It’s always about getting the scene right.”

In season two, Bridges’ Dan Chase and Lithgow’s Harold Harper join forces to recover Emily Chase (Alia Shawkat) after she is kidnapped by a powerful Afghan tribal leader.

To get to the site where she’s being held, the two ride horses, hide in the back of a truck and wend their way through a case. Action-packed? “It’s kind of wild,” Bridges says with a smile. “I love the surprise.”

And when the character can’t remember key elements? “As the title implies, I’m an old man. So, I forget.”

Based on the best-selling novel of the same name, “The Old Man” still has places to go. Jonathan E. Steinberg, who created the television version, “thinks like a playwright,” Brenneman says. “He has always seen this as a three-act play. We don’t know if there’s a season three, but certainly the way season two ends, it’s not the end. It’s the beginning of a whole other chapter of a story.”

“The Old Man” airs on FX and streams on Hulu.