Clint Eastwood’s first-ever movie scene was almost his last: “I thought, I’m going to get punched”
Having etched his name into the Hollywood history books as an icon on both sides of the camera, Clint Eastwood has become a towering figure that every actor and director would love to emulate, even if there will be very few who come close.
Not content with being the iconic star of countless classic movies, Eastwood segued into filmmaking in the early 1970s and went on to helm 40 features, winning four Academy Awards in the process. He’s one of the industry’s most indelible stars and one of its most accomplished auteurs at the same time, and everybody with dreams of succeeding in cinema would kill to achieve just one.
However, things could have ended at the first hurdle after a fresh-faced Eastwood ran afoul of the people in charge of his very first picture. It was hardly a meteoric rise to the top for the performer, who went uncredited in seven of his first nine features, and it wasn’t until he was cast as Rowdy Yates in Rawhide at the end of the 1950s that he finally started to feel as though he’d made it.
Of course, it was Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars that made him a movie star, but a decade beforehand, Eastwood was concerned that making an enemy on his first day shooting the first scene of his career in his first film had cut him off at the knees before he’d even made his debut.
It was producer William Alland who’d initially cast Eastwood in the minor role of a lab assistant called Jennings in 1955’s B-tier creature feature Revenge of the Creature, only for the actor to arrive on set and discover that director Jack Arnold wasn’t overly enthused about using him.
“I walked on set, and the director said, ‘What the hell is this? I told you I don’t want to do that goddamn scene! Who’s this guy?’ I thought, ‘I’m going to get punched,'” he shared with Paul Nelson. “He was screaming and yelling, or else I was just going to wilt to the floor. Probably the latter.”
Alland hired Eastwood to say a few lines, but Arnold didn’t even want to shoot the scene he was hired for. After a heated discussion, the director agreed to shoot it the following morning, meaning Eastwood’s first day as a working actor saw him accomplish absolutely nothing.
“It was a hell of a way to start your acting career: walk on a set, and you know that the director hates the scene,” he said. “Therefore, you know he hates you.” At the time, Eastwood wasn’t entirely convinced that his future lay on the silver screen, and if he’d been booted out of his first-ever acting gig, then there’s a chance his dream would have been over before it had gotten started.
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