The Hollywood craze Clint Eastwood is glad he avoided: “Thank god I didn’t have to do that”
Like most other industries, Hollywood is a place where trends, fads, and crazes enjoy their moment in the spotlight before being replaced by the next shiny new phenomenon. Fortunately for Clint Eastwood, westerns were big business when he was trying to break through.
The icon made his feature debut in 1955’s B-tier monster movie Revenge of the Creature, another genre that was enjoying a surge in popularity at the time. Once casting directors discovered he looked pretty good in a wide-brimmed hat, though, his career really took off.
Admittedly, his first major stab at the western couldn’t have gone much worse when Ambush at Cimarron Pass turned out so terribly that Eastwood was ready to quit the business altogether, but his luck turned shortly afterwards when he was cast as Rowdy Yates on Rawhide to land his breakthrough role.
Already familiar with the ins and outs of the dusty plains and sprawling vistas, Eastwood took a risk when he headed to Spain with an Italian director to knock out a trio of low-budget oaters. Of course, the Dollars trilogy made him a star, and it was an arena the actor would frequently return to once he made his way back Stateside.
These days, Eastwood is undoubtedly one of its two marquee stars, having exited the Old West via Unforgiven as the 1B to John Wayne’s 1A. It was a craze that he was happy to hop aboard and ride until the wheels came off, but the four-time Academy Award winner remains relieved that Hollywood’s current source of obsession was nowhere near as big of a deal when he was in his pomp.
Since the turn of the 21st century, the superhero boom has been in full effect, with comic book adaptations coming out of the woodwork to become Hollywood’s dominant creative force. How would Eastwood have fared if tights and spandex were all the rage back when he was one of Tinseltown’s most in-demand leading men? By his own admission, not great.
“Thank god I didn’t have to that,” he told Deseret, although he did have the opportunity. Eastwood was one of countless names linked to the title role in Richard Donner’s Superman, which he declined partly to avoid the typecasting that would ultimately plague Christopher Reeve.
“That was part of the consideration, a big part,” he reflected on turning down the ‘Man of Steel’. “Look at Reeve; he was excellent. That was a big factor. You get a role like that, and it locks you in a bit. True, I had the western genre and the Dirty Harry role, but everybody made westerns and did cop movies; they didn’t seem as bad.”
It would have been very strange to see Eastwood squeezed into a skintight suit as Superman, and he was lucky enough that comic book adaptations weren’t a pressing concern when he was flying high as an A-list megastar.
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