How Clint Eastwood inspired Angelina Jolie’s performance in ‘Wanted’
Many words have been used to describe Clint Eastwood over the decades, and with all of the respect in the world for a true titan of cinema both on-screen and off, “sultry” has never been one of them.
Quentin Tarantino may have praised the iconic star and acclaimed director for being “the sexiest motherfucker” cinema had to offer at the peak of his smouldering powers, but Eastwood has never been what anybody would call an overtly sensual, alluring, and enigmatically enticing presence leaning on a bespoke combination of sex appeal and badassery.
And yet, that didn’t prevent Angelina Jolie from naming the four-time Academy Award winner as one of the major inspirations behind the character of Fox in Wanted, Timur Bekmambetov’s bonkers comic book adaptation that had James McAvoy curving bullets into the bodies of his enemies in the summer of 2008.
In Mark Millar’s source material, the female lead of the story is entirely different in terms of both appearance and personality, but when Jolie signalled her interest in boarding the bombastic and bullet-riddled blockbuster, the part was rewritten specifically to tailor to what she had in mind.
The actor wanted to make the near-mythical assassin seem “distant and unattainable” to both audiences and McAvoy’s out of his depth protagonist Wesley Gibson, and she sought to capitalise on one of the industry’s finest-ever purveyors of steely-eyed stoicism by echoing many of Eastwood’s most memorable roles to paint Fox as a person who doesn’t speak very often and prefers to let their actions do the talking.
Whether or not it was driven at least partially by recency bias remains up for debate, but it can’t be overlooked that Jolie and Eastwood would collaborate immediately after on the harrowing period-set drama Changeling, which eventually saw the star shortlisted for an Academy Award in the ‘Best Actress’ category for her commanding performance as traumatised single mother, Christine Collins.
Jolie was announced for the Wanted ensemble in March 2007, production kicked off the following month before the star almost instantly jumped into Changeling with Eastwood, which began shooting in October of that same year. Sadly, it remains unknown if she ever mentioned that she’d based her gun-toting turn on the veteran, which would have probably generated a suitably bemused reaction if she had.
Although the Man with No Name and ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan don’t share a lot of obvious DNA with a legendary hired killer who takes orders from a loom that purportedly has the powers to predict the future and determine who deserves to get a shell casing lodged squarely in the middle of their head, there are definitely similarities between Eastwood’s most iconic heroes and the way Jolie carries herself as Fox.
Her dialogue is stripped-back and sparse, but she still says more with a simple glance of raise of the eyebrow than any explanation of her motivations could hope to achieve, something ripped right from the Eastwood playbook of grizzled charisma and doing the most with very little.
Jumping from an Eastwood-inspired performance into an Eastwood-directed movie with virtually no breathing room in between sounds as if it would be enough to cause whiplash, but Jolie was equally memorable in both Wanted and Changeling despite the characters she played occupying opposite ends of the cinematic spectrum.
By his own admission, Eastwood has never been interested in comic book movies after turning down the chance to play Superman in the late 1970s, but that doesn’t mean the generations to follow in his wake can’t seek to emulate – if not replicate – his inimitable style of silent, grizzled charisma.
Jolie is hardly the only female actor to have cited Eastwood as a major influence on an action-heavy role, either, with Carrie-Anne Moss singling him out as a major inspiration on how she approached Trinity in The Matrix. Blockbusters have never really been his thing, but his fingerprints are regularly all over them nonetheless.
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