As if there was ever any doubt that he would, Jeff Bridges abides. 

The 72-year-old actor has had a difficult few years health-wise, but appears to be on the mend after serious situations with both cancer and a near-fatal case of COVID-19. In a new interview with AARP: The Magazine, Bridges revealed that the mass in his stomach when he was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in March 2020 measured a whopping 9 by 12 inches. Now, he says, it’s been reduced to “the size of a marble.” 

He’s worked hard at recovery, utilizing multiple types of chemotherapy, as well as working with a trainer to film the second season of his show The Old Man and walk his daughter down the aisle at her 2021 wedding and dance with her at the reception.

A 2021 tangle with COVID-19 proved to be nearly fatal. 

“For me, cancer was nothing compared to the COVID,” he told AARP. The chemotherapy wiped out his immune system, a disaster when he found out he’d contracted COVID-19.

“I remember the doctor saying to me, ‘Jeff, you’ve got to fight. You’re not fighting.’ But I didn’t get it anymore. I just didn’t know how to do that. I was in surrender mode. I’d say to myself, ‘Everybody dies, and this is me dying.’ And I’d hear myself go, ‘Oh, well, here we are, on to the next adventure.’ ”

He calls his wife, Sue, “my absolute champion.” After she beat her own 2021 case of COVID-19, she returned to the hospital to advocate for Bridges and keep him off the ventilator. 

He also says meditation and positive thinking have been absolutely essential in not his work, but keeping him alive and getting up to face every day. 

“I sometimes just wake up and say, ‘Oh God, I gotta do it again. I gotta get up and do all this stuff I don’t want to do,’” he said. “Fortunately, we’re all so creative, telling ourselves stories about why we feel all that. ‘That’s why I feel bad. And, oh yeah, I forgot about that one.’ And it just rolls on while you’re lying there in bed, and then you get up and get going.”