[Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers for Season 2 of The Old Man.]
In Season 2 of the FX seriesThe Old Man, former CIA agent Dan Chase (Jeff Bridges) and former FBI Assistant Director Harold Harper (John Lithgow) had to face their past and work together, to survive in the present. As stakes got higher and shocking secrets were uncovered, protecting family and loved ones seems impossible, putting the two men in peril and forcing Zoe McDonald (Amy Brenneman) and Emily Chase (Alia Shawkat) to figure out how to best position themselves. And in the final moments, Dan realizes that Emily has all the leverage to force his hand in her favor, which could make for a very interesting Season 3.
Throughout two seasons ofThe Old Man, audiences have watched Emily figure out how to navigate the reveal that she has three fathers – Dan, Harold, and Afghan tribal leader Faraz Hamzad – who have each shaped her in very different ways. The uncertainty about what comes next for her lays the groundwork for where things could be headed next, if the story continues.
After watching the season finale, Collider got the opportunity to chat one-on-one co-creator/showrunnerJonathan E. Steinbergabout the fact that he may never beat the incredible experience he’s had working with this cast, not wanting to retread familiar storytelling ground, what makes Bridges such a great collaborator, what the dogs represent, his interest in continuing to explore what’s next in this father-daughter relationship, feeling like they’re somewhere in the middle of the story they want to tell, and so much more.
Collider: This is my favorite fully adult show with fully adult relationships that’s on TV right now.
JONATHAN E. STEINBERG: That’s a very nice thing to say, actually. Thank you very much.
‘The Old Man’ Cast and Character Guide: Who’s Who In the FX Show
Here’s our cast and character guide to FX’s newest hit show.
What have you most enjoyed about telling this story about these characters and with this cast?
STEINBERG: The cast is the easy answer. I’m aware, on a daily basis, that it is entirely possible that I’ll never work with a cast like this again. Just in every direction you look, there is someone who is capable of doing things that floor you, in any moment. And they also happen to be some of the nicest people I’ve ever worked with. If that’s all it was, this would be a treat. It’s an unusual story. It’s a story that I hadn’t quite seen before.It’s a story about a daughter with three fathers and what that means.It’s significantly more complicated than a parent with three children. I think you’ve seen that story a lot. When you invert it, it gets complicated in really interesting ways. And so, untangling that story and trying to figure out how to tell something with as much emotional gravity as possible has been really interesting.
‘The Old Man’ Showrunner Jonathan E. Steinberg Wants To Keep Shaking Things Up on the Series
It feels like each of the relationships on this show are different from what we’ve seen before.
STEINBERG: Every season, every episode, every scene, that’s the goal. If I’ve seen it before, or I feel like we’ve done it before, I try to throw it away and figure out a place for the story to go that just feels new. The freedom to do that is also rare, especially at this scale of production. Having partners like FX and 20th and everybody who’s really made this possible is a big deal.
‘The Old Man’ Season 2 Review: Jeff Bridges' FX Thriller Strikes a More Grounded Tone
Alia Shawkat steals the show this time around as ‘The Old Man’ returns for Season 2.
Jeff Bridges seems like a special kind of human being that you would just want to hang out with, but he’s also a great actor that’s compelling to watch and who can probably pull off just about anything. What have you learned from working and collaborating with someone like him? How has he shaped your perspective of this character, as you’ve seen what he’s done with the role?
STEINBERG: That’s a good question. It’s not a show. He is that guy. He may be the most approachable person on a set that I’ve ever been around, which is saying a lot. He doesn’t have to be. He’s just that person. How is this character different for having done this with him? I don’t know if that’s something I could articulate. In building a character like this, you want to be applying all kinds of dimensions to, there are just long conversations of trying to get into his head, where I’m hoping it’ll go, and what I want to do with it and gauging his reactions and trusting his instincts. And also, watching what he does well and watching how these scenes play out creates a bit of a roadmap. When you create a situation that you get a pretty amazing scene out of, you want to push it further and see what you’re able to do with it.
Is he someone who has a lot of questions and ideas to share, or does he like to just do his thing and then get feedback on it?
STEINBERG: Both. He’s really open about how he feels about things and he’s got all kinds of ideas.He is one of the most unafraid artists I’ve ever been around to try stuff and to not worry about it not working, or not worry about it being wrong or silly, or whatever. He’s just willing to try stuff. That spirit does affect the story and is something that makes it easier to be a little bit more aggressive about where we want to take it, knowing that he’s up for anything. And we’ll respond when there are things that he loves or things that he feels like there might be better ways to do.
The Finale of ‘The Old Man’ Season 2 Marks Both an Ending and a Beginning
You left last season in a place that it would have been really sad not to get more. And at the end of this season, you’ve left things again in a place with a very similar feeling. What made you decide to bring the story to the conclusion that you do in Season 2, where it feels like there’s a clear sense of what the next steps would be for a possible Season 3?
STEINBERG: There was something that felt correct and clean that the end of the second season would really be the first time he has ever met and sat across from his adult daughter and seen her. Most of her adulthood was spent on the phone in a way that allowed them to conceal parts of themselves from each other.Part of it is that everybody loves a good cliffhanger, but part of it was that it just felt like the right moment.What has the story earned over the course of the season? The idea that it earned them meeting for the first time felt backwards in an interesting way and felt like both the end of something and the beginning of something that I want to be around for.
Jeff Bridges Has Hints For ‘The Old Man’ Season 3 But Doesn’t Want to Spoil Anything
Bridges also talks about how he’s never been disappointed in ‘The Old Man’ and the wonderful collaboration of the past two seasons.
She’s really basically saying, “I am now what you made me.”
STEINBERG: “I am what you made me, and I am what I was supposed to be before you prevented me.” It’s all of those things. Her story on the page, and what Alia [Shawkat] has done with it, is just really exciting to me. The idea of this woman who is finding the history to her story, and connection and power in it, without any real guidance as to how to use it or what to do with it, and is still carrying all the baggage of her relationship with her mother and just having lost her biological father before she really got to know him, having an actor like that to play with in that story is really a treat.
In ‘The Old Man,’ Emily Chase Is Her Father’s Daughter, but Which Father?
You set things up with a pretty clear sense of what would come next. You’ve put Angela Adams / Emily Chase / Parwana Hamzad in this position of power which would change the dynamic next season. What most excites you about where that could go next and what you could explore with the relationship and the dynamic with that change to it?
STEINBERG: It’s a hard question to answer because it lives in a few different directions. There’s something interesting about her having been raised by somebody who taught her that protecting the people you love is the ultimate virtue, and then being asked to protect a family she’s just met. That’s an interesting dynamic. The idea of someone who never felt connected to anything other than her two parents, finding out that there is a centuries-old, generation-long legacy that she is responsible for maintaining is an interesting position to put somebody in, who doesn’t really have the tools to manage that. The idea thatshe has finally become the heir to her father’s throne, that Dan Chase tried to prevent her from finding out about, felt like somewhere in the middle of this spy movie, there was a fairy tale that wanted to get told. That’s always exciting to me, when these things start to acquire structure from all kinds of weird genres and pull them all into one story.
One of the things I love so much about the series is that it could have easily just focused on Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow’s characters and pushed Amy Brenneman’s character to the side. But instead, as a character, she’s really found her footing and found how she can fit into this situation. And I feel like you did a very similar thing onBlack Sails, where you really gave the female characters room to grow and find out how they fit into their world. How do you view the character of Zoe? What makes her an equally important part of the story for you?
STEINBERG: In some way, the story is about found family and about families by choice and constructed families. The idea that she becomes a part of the story in that way feels organic. In some ways, it is a story about how people have certain capacities that may be nurtured or may be ignored and may be invisible for a very long time. I think of Alia’s character in terms of stepping into this role to inherit her father’s business and his legacy. It was just as interesting to me that Dan Chase ran into a woman who possessed this thing that, if you are just a divorced woman living in rural Pennsylvania, presents as a problem and presents as something that makes you feel like you are deficient or that you are destructive in the relationships you’re in. And then, you meet somebody who shows you that thing, when used in a different way, is a really rare and dangerous and interesting asset. That takes the idea of a story about a spy who finds a woman on the road, and they go on a thing together out of the straight and narrow of where you assume the genre is going to go, and turns it into a story about identity and who those people are and how much he’s going to learn about himself from her, in a way that doesn’t require her to have been a spy. There’s no secret spy background that needs to be present for a person to just have the raw materials in their head and in their soul, to match with somebody from a very different background.
I love something even just as small as her winning the dogs over and them growling at him. It says so much about who she is, as a person.
STEINBERG: Yeah. In a way,I think the dogs are his subconscious anyway and have been, from the beginning of the show. And in a moment where your subconscious is growling at you, it’s making it pretty clear that you should check yourself and that you may have taken a wrong step.
What do you think it says about these people that for Dan Chase, Harold Harper can attempt to have him assassinated, and yet he seems to be able to get past that and work with him. And Zoe can get thrown into a trunk and into this world by this man, but then somehow seems to accept that and doesn’t just return to normal life. Do you have to be a very particular kind of person to be able to really understand the situation in that way?
STEINBERG: It’s partly the materials that Zoe possesses. The shape that Dan Chase or Harold Harper have taken to exist in that world is a combination of being morally flexible when it comes to taking things personally and morally resolute when it comes to deciding what’s important and what your job is to protect. For Harold Harper and Dan Chase, there is also a sense that some things are just in the game. The fact that Zoe is able to do it is maybe part of that, and maybe also partly that she is able to find herself an effective counterpunch to even the scales pretty quickly.
Jeff Bridges on What ‘The Old Man’ Has in Common with ‘Tron’
Amy Brenneman also talks about how this character is so much more than just the woman in a spy movie.
There’s so much going on between Harold and Marion, toward the end of the season. Their conversations are so interesting because it’s not just what they’re saying, but it’s also their facial expressions and body language. She really feels like someone who holds her cards so close to the chest that nobody sees them. Have we even scratched the surface of who she is, what she’s doing, and what she wants?
STEINBERG: In a way, she’s in a similar place in her story that Emily is and in a way that Harold Harper is.They are seeing a range of outcomes ahead of them and seeing an evolution happening that hasn’t remotely gotten close to finishing transforming them into what they could be, what they might want to be, and what they’re afraid they’ll be. That is as true for her as it is for anyone else. She is now emerging from a moment in which she’s been told that she has this capacity, and where she has passed the first few tests into a moment where she’s going to become a little bit more of a driver in the story. The idea that she studied at Morgan Boat’s knee in his final days is something that, in a Season 3, we would really want to explore. In a story about how Morgan Boat had too many sons, the idea that he finally found a daughter who would listen is an interesting story and it’s as big of an evolution for her moving forward, as it was for her to find Dan Chase in the first place.
In the moment that Dan had the phone call with Emily and he was sure that she was dead, the choice to have that happen off-screen for that character made me feel like that was something you would revisit at some point. Was it hard to figure out how to have that moment be so emotionally heartbreaking while not actually showing the audience what happened?
STEINBERG: Yes and no. I think to me. To him, Emily, as an adult, is a voice on the phone. It’s the only way that they’ve communicated. It’s the only relationship he has with her. So, in a moment where he was going to lose her, that felt right. The idea that’s baked pretty deep into Season 1, that they hadn’t seen each other in years and had really only been a disembodied voice in each other’s heads, it felt like, how else could you do it, other than having him lose her in that format? For me, there are different rules for, am I trying to tell an audience this character is dead, or am I trying to tell an audience that this other character thinks she is dead because the story that he’s going to have to go through to deal with that is worth telling? This feels to me like a reasonably close textbook case of the latter. You didn’t see a body in the most outsized way possible, but he believes that. Knowing what he knows about the situation she’s facing, he knows there’s just no way out of that. He is separated from being a parent, in that way. That was, in a way, the only way to tell that story and to get him to a place where he could decide what he wanted, separate from what he owed his daughter, was for her not to be around anymore, even for a moment. That felt like a combination of events that we had to go through to get him there.
While this obviously is an exploration of humanity and it’s a great character study, you also just have some badass action sequences in this series. What was your favorite this season?
STEINBERG: That’s a good question. To me, it’s the build up and the wind up to Emily taking back that village from Russian mercenaries. While not super action heavy, that’s just a really fun lean in. Any time we get to explore what action and violence is to Dan Chase or to the people around him, it’s fun. The fight in Afghanistan in Episode 3 where he needs her help is a strange estranged father-daughter moment, to watch him do this thing that he knows how to do and has done more times than he can remember, but he’s never done it with his daughter lending a hand, and just what that says about where the story is going from there. With any of these fights, they are best when they’re doing stuff like that and they’re contributing to big steps forward in the emotional story.
‘The Old Man’ Showrunner Jonathan E. Steinberg Knows Where the Overall Story Is Headed
Have you envisioned this story as a specific number of seasons? Did you have a bigger picture of what three seasons would be? Have you thought beyond that?
STEINBERG: Yes, I had a pretty good sense of what the larger story looked like. How many seasons it would take to tell that story was a little fuzzier. Season 1 was a little bit of a contortion, just because of everything we were dealing with. Some of what I had imagined for the story, at the beginning, had to get maneuvered around a little bit because of the way the world ended up unfolding with COVID and with Jeff’s illness and that long delay. But I think we’re on track.We’re somewhere in the middle of the story that I thought we were going to tell.How much is left is in someone else’s hands, but I feel like we’re on schedule, in terms of where we wanted to be.
The Old Man
Premiering on FX in 2022, The Old Man is a Thriller and Drama series starring Jeff Bridges. The film sees Bridges playing Dan Chase, an ex-CIA operative and war veteran that kills an intruder that enters his home and then goes into hiding to avoid the law.
The Old Manis available to stream on Hulu. Check out the Season 2 finale trailer:Watch on Hulu
