Why Clint Eastwood and John Wayne disagreed on acting: “There’s no such thing”
Westerns were the bread and butter of Hollywood action back in the industry’s golden age, but when you think of stoic, rugged men riding around the Great Plains on horseback, the vast likelihood is that two names come to mind: John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.
Admittedly, Wayne had a bit of a head start when it came to the western rivalry with Clint Eastwood. By the time the stoney-faced Eastwood made his first major film appearances during the late 1950s, Wayne was arguably already past the peak of his career. Despite continuing to act in countless works throughout the 1950s and up until his later years in the 1970s, it is fair to say that The Duke’s most notable roles happened years earlier, with films like Stagecoach in 1939.
Even still, there was some degree of crossover between the two actors. Not only did the pair become respective icons of the western genre, with Wayne paving the way for the aloof masculine type that Eastwood played so well in the Dollars trilogy, for instance, but they were even considered for the same roles on a handful of occasions.
Namely, a 63-year-old John Wayne was, at one point, determined to play the leading role in 1971’s Dirty Harry. While it is certainly interesting to imagine an old and, let’s be honest, fairly out-of-shape Wayne playing the maverick detective, it is easy to see why Wayne ended up turning the role down. In the end, the production company chose the much younger and much better-suited Eastwood. However, that decision certainly highlighted the many differences between the two actors, despite existing largely within the same genre of film.
It is easy to view all action actors as being interchangeable, to an extent. Particularly within the world of westerns, as long as you can pull off a hat and stare stoically into the middle distance, with a pistol strapped to your waist, you’re in. However, there is a lot more nuance to the acting process than that, at least in the case of Clint Eastwood. While Wayne was always quick to downplay his own acting abilities and the acting profession in general as being rather simplistic, his younger counterpart tended to disagree.
As Eastwood once shared in an interview with Paul Nelson, “John Wayne used to make statements like that. He said, ‘I’m not an actor, I’m a reactor.’ You don’t just sit and react, though.”
Giving an insight into his own acting techniques, the ‘Man with No Name’ continued, “You have motivating forces that drive you on as an actor, as a performer performing that character.”
“There’s no such thing as a reactor,” he said, in contradiction of Wayne’s take on acting. “It’s not a very concise statement on what acting’s all about—if there is a concise statement on what acting’s all about.” Whether or not Eastwood’s different view on acting is indicative of a rivalry with Wayne, it certainly explains their vastly different filmographies.
Wayne, for instance, spent many of his later decades making largely unwatchable films, typically playing virtually the same character in each of them and becoming increasingly difficult to work with over the years. Eastwood, meanwhile, boasts a far more expansive filmography and has since moved into the director’s chair, too. So, perhaps having more of a nuanced take on the field of acting pays off in the long run.
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