‘The Old Man’ EPs Reveal Star Jeff Bridges Loves Their Other Show, ‘Percy Jackson and the Olympians’: “He Just Could Not Stop Talking About All the Greek Mythology”

FX’s The Old Man seems, at first glance, to be a rather excellent addition to the spy genre. There are false identities, brutal hand-to-hand fight scenes, and a leading man running from (or is it now to?) his past as a CIA operative. The Old Man has so many of the calling cards of the classic espionage thriller, and yet, that’s not what is truly the bedrock of the show’s success.

Unlike other spy thrillers, the stakes driving the now-elderly agent who goes by Dan Chase ( Jeff Bridges ) to bust skulls and cross international datelines have nothing to do with saving the world. There’s no nuclear-coded MacGuffin spurring the action, nor is there jingoistic sentimentality about the good ole USA. Instead, Dan Chase and his associates are driven by the most personal stakes imaginable. Chase and pal, FBI big wig Harold Harper ( John Lithgow ), are sneaking into Afghanistan in The Old Man Season 2 to save Chase’s daughter (and Harper’s protege) Emily ( Alia Shawkat ) from being kidnapped by an Afghani warlord.

The twist? The would-be villain Faraz Hamzad (Navid Negahban) is not only responsible for maintaining a delicate balance of peace for his people, but he “kidnapped” Emily because she had been kidnapped from him first. Chase’s wife and Emily’s mother was originally with Hamzad. When the lovers left Afghanistan together, they took her young daughter Parwana with them and raised her as Emily Chase.

The Old Man is, in fact, a family drama.

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“Even though, you know, the spy genre is is all over [ The Old Man ], this has always been built as a family story,” series executive producer Dan Shotz told Decider at Summer 2024 TCA. “It’s a father/daughter story. It’s two fathers and their daughter. It’s about loss. It’s about this next chapter in a family of what do you do when, you know, can you look forward? Or is this the end of your term?”

Shotz explained that The Old Man is “always centered” in the emotion drama, because that’s how you get an audience to care about the show they’re watching.

“I think that’s always where you start with: Why do you care about this? You don’t necessarily care about it because it’s a spy genre,” Shotz said. “You care about it because you fall in love with these characters and how they relate to each other.”

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“And then we get the candy of all the spy stuff, all the action, and everything else that’s around it.”

Together Shotz and The Old Man ‘s co-creator and showrunner Jon Steinberg have developed a distinct style wherein they tackle what other creatives would perceive as genre storytelling by putting the emotional drama first. Steinberg and Shotz are also executive producers on Disney+’s highly successful series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians . Like The Old Man , Percy Jackson follows a young protagonist who grows up with no notion of who their father really is. However, in Percy’s case, his father isn’t an Afghani warlord, but Poseidon, the Ancient Greek god of the sea.

“I think it’s impossible to write them the way they were written without them kind of feeling like they were made from the same material,” Steinberg said. “Some of it, I think, is just in the conceit of where we started. You know, both our books. Both are books that were presented in different ways, but both start with their own sense of their own canon.”

Steinberg admitted that both The Old Man and Percy Jackson and the Olympians are “going through the same head,” insomuch the same showrunners are adapting, and affecting, them. However, he pointed out that thematically the two projects were already very similar.

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“But they are stories about people trying to find a place they belong and trying to figure out where they fit within a family and whether that family is the only one they’re ever going to have,” Steinberg said. “If there are similarities, some of them may be accidental, but not all of them.”

“ The thirteen-year-olds are a lot more mature than the seventy-year-olds,” Shotz joked.

“ It’s true,” Steinberg said.

Intriguingly, both FX’s The Old Man and Disney+’s Percy Jackson are owned by the same company. Could a crossover between the two tonally different, but thematically similar, shows ever happen?

“Yes, you are not the first to suggest that,” Steinberg said. “No, it is definitely something we have our eye on.”

“It was fun when Jeff called us and said he watched the show and he just could not stop talking about all the Greek mythology,” Shotz said.

“Well, there’s already been a crossover,” Steinberg pointed out. “Jessica Parker Kennedy is in both [ The Old Man and Percy Jackson and the Olympians ]. So it’s already happening.”

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