How Clint Eastwood inspired a classic ‘Star Wars’ character
Somebody as iconic as Clint Eastwood casts a shadow so large that it can often inhabit the corners of some very unlikely places, with a galaxy far, far away just one of many unexpected settings where the legendary star has inadvertently made his presence felt.
The actor was named as being an inspiration for Meryl Streep’s performance in The Devil Wears Prada, with the intimidating and all-powerful fashionista a “direct steal” from the four-time Academy Award winner, not that it was readily apparent when watching the hit comedy.
To get into the mindset required for being squeezed into a leather catsuit, being suspended in the air on wires, and kicking all sorts of ass in the game-changing sci-fi blockbuster The Matrix, Carrie-Anne Moss decided there was no better place to turn than Eastwood’s back catalogue of classics.
Hugh Jackman channelled the spirit of Unforgiven when he went out on his claws as Wolverine in James Mangold’s Logan, while Angelina Jolie weaponised the charismatic air of mystery that defined many of Eastwood’s most memorable characters when she was curving bullets through the air in Timur Bekmambetov’s explosive Wanted.
The common denominator between them is that every single one of those movies were at least set on this planet, something that can’t be said of Star Wars. And yet, when George Lucas was squirrelling away on the designs for figures who would soon become the most instantly recognisable in the genre’s history, even he found himself drawn to Eastwood.
“There were quite a few films made about bounty hunters in the Old West,” he explained per CBR. “That’s where that came from. When I was writing the early scripts for Star Wars, I wanted to develop an essentially evil character that was frightening. Darth Vader started as a kind of intergalactic bounty hunter in a space suit and evolved into a more grotesque knight as I got more into knights and the codes of everything.”
Whereas Darth Vader ended up getting a striking all-black costume of his own, Boba Fett ended up being a beneficiary of the Eastwood effect, with Lucas describing him as “very much like the Man with No Name from the Sergio Leone westerns.” Akira Kurosawa, the socio-political climate in Vietnam-era America, and the B-tier sci-fi serials he’d grown up watching were all key influences on Star Wars, so it made sense that Eastwood would be part of it, too.
After all, his breakthrough in A Fistful of Dollars was forced to credit Kurosawa’s Yojimbo when the threat of legal action loomed overhead, he was drafted during the Korean War before being too old to have it happen again in Vietnam, and his first screen credit came in 1955’s B-tier sci-fi Revenge of the Creature, so it was only logical that he’d end up factoring into Star Wars in his own unique way.
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