Jeff Bridges: Cancer appears to be in remission

Academy Award winner Jeff Bridges says the non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma with which he was diagnosed in October 2020 appears to be in remission.

The cancerous tumor has shrunk “to the size of a marble,” the 73-year-old star of the FX espionage drama “The Old Man” says in the new issue of AARP The Magazine. Complicating matters was the COVID-19 that had struck him while his immune system was compromised by chemotherapy, leaving him hospitalized for five weeks, at times unable to breathe without an oxygen feed.

“For me,” he says, “cancer was nothing compared to the COVID.” His treatment included “convalescent plasma” — blood plasma from COVID-19 survivors that contains viral antibodies. Afterward, “A lot of getting better was a matter of setting really small goals. At first they’d say, ‘How long can you stand?’ For a while, my record was 45 seconds before I’d collapse. And then they were saying: ‘Oh, look, you’re standing for a minute! That’s so cool, now can you walk 5 feet?’”

Bridges has starred in decades of films including "The Last Picture Show" (1971), "The Fabulous Baker Boys" (1989),"The Big Lebowski" (1998), "Iron Man" (2008), "Crazy Heart" (2009), for which he won the Oscar for best actor, and "Hell or High Water" (2016), for which he received his seventh nomination.