Academy Award winning actor Jeff Bridges is the star of the show The Old Man, but ahead of the show’s international debut he revealed he was originally hesitant to dip his toe into the medium.
In an interview with Variety that covers a spectrum of topics, Bridges revealed that he was kind of familiar with the source material (a Thomas Perry novel) before he was offered the role. Turns out a friend of his sent him the book years ago but he didn’t read it. His wife did, however.
“And then I was sent the script and I thought, ‘Oh, this title looks so familiar.’ My wife said, ‘Yeah, that was the book that Tim sent you’ and I read the script and I said, ‘Oh, that’s pretty good.'”
He went back to the book and as well and called it a “page turner.” He was hooked and and when he met with producers John Steinberg and Warren Littlefield he was even more intrigued. “Oh, this is something to get into.”
Bridges said he “originally resisted doing television. My father, Lloyd Bridges, had done several TV shows, and I saw how he was kind of frustrated with how quickly the shows were shot, and how they couldn’t pay as much attention to detail and so forth.”
But once he started watching modern shows, he realized “There was really no differences in making the show than there was movies.”
It didn’t hurt that Bridges considered the writing on the show to be top notch.
“And then as much as the story was interesting it was really the writing, you know, John Steinberg and Warren Littlefield, I was a fan of different stuff that they had done. And the kind of cast that they were talking about, it was a package that all started to come together.”
The Old Man is currently streaming on a variety of platforms. It appears on Disney Plus internationally today.
