The only cameo appearance of Clint Eastwood’s career was built on a lie: “This is not going in”
Big-name actors making unannounced cameo appearances in random movies has been commonplace in Hollywood for decades, but it’s not something Clint Eastwood has ever been interested in.
Ironically, the one time he did it, he agreed to do so on one condition, which went unfulfilled.
In the interest of splitting hairs, in this instance, ‘cameo’ means a proper glimpse of the iconic actor and filmmaker’s face onscreen. Sure, he was briefly spied in American Sniper in a wide shot as he walked into a church and was spotted hunched over a fence in Breezy, but those don’t really count.
Those are the only two pictures the four-time Academy Award winner has directed where he’s sneakily inserted himself into a shot, and it wasn’t as if he was going full-blown Alfred Hitchcock and distracting the audience. Unless the viewer’s eyes were peeled, they’d have never even noticed he was there.
However, Brad Silberling’s supernatural family-friendly comedy, Casper, was definitely a cameo. In the scene where Bill Pullman’s James Harvey freaks out in front of a mirror, his face morphs into a rapid-fire succession of famous faces, with Eastwood followed by Rodney Dangerfield, Mel Gibson, and the Crypt Keeper.
Because they can never stay out of each other’s orbit for too long, the star-studded 30-second sequence that saw Eastwood make his first and only cameo in someone else’s picture originated from Steven Spielberg, with Silberling revealing that the director catching sight of an apparition while filming Duel was his inspiration.
“I turned to Steven and was like, ‘How are we going to do it?'” Silberling told SyFy. “He goes, ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll make some calls.'” The only one who showed any reluctance was Eastwood, who told Spielberg he’d agree to shoot the quick guest spot if the Jaws creator did it, too.
“He said to me, ‘I’ve got to do it, but it’s never going to be in the movie,'” Silberling recalled. “We did Steven last, and it was awesome. I got to direct Steven, which was really fun. And he was really nervous, even though he knew it was never going to be in the film. And then again, he looked at me afterwards, he was walking off set, going, ‘This is not going in.'”
Eastwood’s one condition for turning up for a hot minute to shoot a few seconds of footage for Casper was that Spielberg follow suit. Weaponising his status as the movie’s executive producer, the Hollywood heavyweight told a blatant white lie to the legend’s face: he said he’d film a cameo of his own, and he technically did, but he knew from the beginning that it wasn’t going into the final cut.
As far as lies being told between friends, it wasn’t particularly egregious. Still, Spielberg completely pulled the wool over Eastwood’s eyes and convinced him to contribute to Casper and then exploited a loophole to ensure the one thing he needed to do in order to get the Dirty Harry and Unforgiven frontman into the picture wouldn’t be seen by anyone.
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