Jeff Bridges Shares Candid Perspective On Mortality After Cancer And COVID Battles

Jeff Bridges talks about his personal reflections on life, loss, and death, having experienced multiple life-threatening health complications. During a recent interview with PEOPLE, the King Kong actor discussed how his battle with non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and COVID-19 have heightened his awareness about death.

“It just heightened the experience of most of my philosophies in life, and it all gets down to that corny ‘L’ word — love,” Bridges admitted to the news outlet. “That seems to be what’s running my ship, and going through these tough times, it kind of exacerbated all of that philosophy of love. When you get close to losing something like that, your gratitude and your thankfulness for what you have, the people that you love, and the love that you feel for your loved ones, grows. It just magnifies it, and that was something positive that came out of it.”

Jeff Bridges says his cancer treatment made him vulnerable to COVID-19

In October 2020, the 73-year-old made a public announcement on Twitter about his diagnosis of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, after which he started undergoing chemotherapy. However, the actor contracted COVID-19 in January 2021, and this had a severe impact on his immune system and further complicated his health problems.

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“I had no defenses. That’s what chemo does — it strips you of all your immune system. I had nothing to fight it,” he confessed to PEOPLE. “COVID made my cancer look like nothing.”

Jeff Bridges caught another round of COVID

More recently, while promoting his FX series The Old Man around the world, Bridges contracted another case of COVID-19.

Bridges shared with PEOPLE that even though the second round of COVID-19 was not as severe, he stated that it was a significant factor in his participation in AstraZeneca’s Up the Antibodies campaign, an initiative that aims to educate people on how to take care of themselves if they do get infected.