Jeff Bridges says he was more ‘p***sed off’ than fearful during five-week Covid ICU stint

‘It was not so much fear as me being p***ed off,’ the 72-year-old said

Jeff Bridges has revealed he was more “p***ed off” than fearful during his five-week stint in the inensive care unity (ICU) with Covid-19.

The 72-year-old star of The Old Man caught Covid in January 2021 while at the tail end of battling non-Hodgkin lymphoma, but he said it was the respiratory disease that nearly killed him.

He spent five weeks in the ICU with Covid that “made the cancer look like nothing. It just kicked my ass”.

“God, it brought so many different emotions and feelings,” Bridges told The Independent in a new interview.

“Fear wasn’t a real strong one. It was mainly kind of the feeling of getting with the programme.”

He added that one of the things he thought of while he was sick was that he “didn’t want to die” and that the illness made him realise “how much I love being alive”.

Bridges added that he got irritated by having to constantly stay in bed.

“My big thing was I’d be in this bed, and I had that thing up my nose, and oxygen, and if I wanted to turn over, I would have to call the nurse,” he explained.

“The state of not being able to breathe is just bizarre,” he added. “So just to roll over in bed onto my side being a 15-minute process – that was a pain in the ass.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Bridges said he initially felt “very frustrated” while making Marvel’s Iron Man film.

Bridges starred opposite Robert Downey Jr in the 2008 film, and said that it was “kind of written day by day”.