THE DUDE SURVIVES

JEFF BRIDGES has played RUGGED, MYSTICAL ICONS like HIMSELF on film for decades (and decades!). He's 72 now. Never expected TO BATTLE CANCER and THEN COVID. And yet? He abides.

- ALEX PAPPADEMAS

ОН, WOW, MAN -it's Jeff Bridges. Alive and well, at 72. Like, really well, from the looks of things. He's walking around a photo studio in Santa Barbara on a hot, still Tuesday. When he walks, he leads with his rib cage, his weight in his heels, his whole posture telegraphing a wide-openness to the world.

He's been telling me where that posture comes from- it's thanks in large part to these isometric exercises he learned from a trainer named Eric Goodman, which are designed to get the muscles in the backside of your body to work together to support you better, so that the burden of carrying your weight around the planet doesn't fall solely on your poor, embattled joints, and which have freed Bridges from some hellacious back pain but he'd rather show me.

And that's how he ends up standing over me, a fatherly hand on my shoulder, helping me bend, saying, "Hinge! Hinge!" as I try and mostly fail to hinge myself, and then, to demonstrate how I should be holding my body, he takes a bit of my hair and tugs it upward, not hard, just firmly, directionally.

He doesn't seem, at all, like somebody who was on the verge of death just last year. He was, though. In 2020, the Dude was diagnosed with cancer, specifically lymphoma, and just as he was pulling through that, he caught Covid, and because the chemo that had knocked the lymphoma down to size had also left Bridges severely immunocompromised, the Covid really kicked his ass, making cancer look like a cakewalk in retrospect-and because he is Jeff Bridges, and was already a pretty spiritual guy, all of this did not engender anything you'd call a spiritual awakening. But it's got him thinking more about things about time, mostly, and about the specific strain of neurosis with which he's always approached his work, and about what he wants to leave behind when it's actually all over.