The Dude hasn’t just beaten cancer and COVID — but death.
Jeff Bridges said in an interview out Thursday that it was his battle with lymphoma that left him vulnerable to COVID-19 — prior to when people could get vaccinated against the virus — nearly costing the “Big Lebowski” star his life.
“The chemo wipes out your immune system and when COVID hit me, I had nothing to fight it,” the 72-year-old Oscar winner, who was hospitalized for more than four months, told E! News. “I was just really at death’s door a couple of times there.”
Bridges told the outlet that he was “in surrender mode” and worried he wouldn’t be able to walk his daughter down the aisle, but doctors told him to keep fighting.
“With a great medical team, great trainers and my family, everybody brought me back,” he continued.
Bridges shared in October 2020 that he had been diagnosed with lymphoma, which made him “appreciate my mortality.” By the following January, his tumor had “drastically shrunk.” In September 2021, Bridges said he was in remission and earlier this year, he said he was feeling “terrific.”
He had told “Entertainment Tonight” in June that COVID, following chemo, “just… wiped me out.”
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