Clint Eastwood’s decision to reject ‘Die Hard’: “I don’t get the humour”
Clint Eastwood has played more than his fair share of iconic roles. Most actors would kill for just one of them, but he’s had two that have pretty much defined his entire persona in every other film. In Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy, he played the mysterious, monosyllabic gunslinger, ‘The Man with No Name’. In the Dirty Harry movies, he played the titular LA cop whose violent streak was feared by criminals and colleagues alike.
The actor reprised these roles in a total of eight films between 1964 when A Fistful of Dollars was released, and 1988, when he made his final appearance as ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan in The Dead Pool. Most of his roles on screen are some variation or combination of these characters, which makes it difficult to imagine him in the iconic role he almost landed.
When screenwriter Jeb Stuart was writing the character John McClane in his script for Die Hard, it was Eastwood who he had in mind. But when the team behind the film approached the star, he simply wasn’t interested. “Ironically, his response to the producers was, ‘I don’t get the humour,'” Stuart said in an interview with /Film.
This was a surprise to the writer, who said that few other actors could deliver a line like, “Come to LA, have a great time,” with the level of dry humour that he’d written for McClane. “You could see him doing that,” Stuart said. “He was my inspiration.” Eastwood had indeed done a similar type of menacingly deadpan humour as Harry Callahan. “Go ahead, make my day” is one of cinema’s most iconic lines, and it almost certainly would not have been if Eastwood hadn’t delivered it with note-perfect sarcasm.
You might assume that when Eastwood turned down the role, the producers would immediately have come to their senses and handed it straight to Bruce Willis on a silver platter, but they didn’t. In fact, they went to just about every other male actor in Hollywood first. Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford, Robert De Niro, Charles Bronson, and Mel Gibson all turned it down, as did Richard Gere and Burt Reynolds.
By the time they made it to Willis, the producers were probably panicking about the prospects of the film. At the time, the actor was known for starring in the comedy-drama series Moonlighting, in which he played a wisecracking detective. His film roles were limited to a couple of uncredited background appearances and the Blake Edwards rom-com Blind Date, which was not well-received. There wasn’t much to indicate that Willis had movie star potential, let alone action star potential.
Needless to say, the gamble paid off, and it’s difficult to imagine any other actor playing John McClane, let alone doing it better. As well-suited as Eastwood is to the action genre, he probably had a point when he turned down the role. Willis imbues the character with off-the-charts charm rather than brooding sarcasm, which makes Die Hard a feel-good movie as well as an action-packed one. We can all thank Eastwood for knowing his limits.
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