Refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer: the actor Clint Eastwood admires the “tenacity” of
Anyone who wants to make it in Hollywood requires a certain degree of tenacity, which Clint Eastwood knows all about, having spent years toiling away before his big break and then refusing to be typecast once he’d made it.
The early years of any performer’s career feature plenty of rejection, something the young Eastwood had grown accustomed to as he continued trying to get his foot in the door. Rawhide led to the Dollars trilogy, and suddenly, he was one of the most popular stars of his era.
He made his fair share of Westerns during that period, but by moving into directing, founding his own production company, and trying his hand at multiple different genres, the legendary star ensured his future by regularly ignoring the advice of his representatives in favour of trying something new.
His team urged him not to co-star with an orangutan in Every Which Way but Loose, which ended up becoming the highest-grossing entry in his entire filmography at the time. Even those working their way up the ladder need to be determined and tenacious to break out from the pack, which left Eastwood full of admiration for an actor and filmmaker who completely embodied it.
It’s a story told so many times it’s become part of industry folklore, but Sylvester Stallone insisting that he’d only allow Rocky to be made if he played the lead role deserves its spot. After all, it was a box office bonanza, an awards season darling, and laid the foundations for a career that’s still going strong almost half a century later, so things would have turned out very differently had he bowed to the pressure.
By his own admission, Eastwood hasn’t seen the sprawling franchise in its entirety, but he did rank the first Rocky among his favourite boxing flicks in an interview with Bright Lights, in addition to praising the creator of the ‘Italian Stallion’. “I loved the first one,” he said. “I haven’t seen them all, so I can’t speak to the whole group. I always admired Stallone’s tenacity to go ahead and get that made.”
It sounds as though Eastwood has seen at least a couple of Rocky movies, though, otherwise he’d have made a point of clarifying it was just the first. Hopefully, the fifth one isn’t among that number because it sucks incredibly hard, while the prospect of the four-time Academy Award winner’s signature thousand-yard stare being cast in the direction of Paulie talking to a robot in Rocky IV is something definitely worth thinking about.
Either way, everyone would surely agree that Rocky is unquestionably one of cinema’s greatest-ever tales of pugilism, and it’s a do-it-yourself success story Stallone has been dining out on ever since.
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