The iconic 1970s role Clint Eastwood refused to play twice: “I think Clint’s had all he can take of me”
Whether by accident or design, it says a lot about Clint Eastwood that of the only three onscreen roles he’s ever reprised, two of them are undoubtedly the most iconic of his entire career.
While they each had different names within the context of the film, Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy is very much a trilogy, with Eastwood playing the ‘Man with No Name’ as the same character in all three of the spaghetti western masterpieces, but he refused be bitten by the franchise bug.
His other signature role, Harry Callahan, headlined five action thrillers of diminishing quality, but he resisted the urge to keep bringing the gun-toting renegade cop out of retirement for a sixth go-around, although he did once confirm he’d play the part and provide his likeness for a scrapped video game.
The third is the outlier, but you can understand why the four-time Academy Award winner thought Philo Beddoe was worth revisiting when Every Which Way but Loose, the odd-couple caper he was told to stay away from, became the most profitable picture he ever made, and adjusted for inflation, it’s still the highest-grossing film in which he played the lead role.
He’s had plenty of chances to add another recurring gig to the collection, and he could have done it with what’s, no offence intended to Unforgiven, his greatest-ever picture. The production was beset by difficulties and a coup that changed Hollywood forever, but that didn’t stop The Outlaw Josey Wales from emerging as a masterpiece.
Asa Earl Carter’s 1972 novel, The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, had inspired the movie, and in the same year Eastwood’s big-screen adaptation was released, the follow-up book, The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales, hit the shelves. After The Outlaw Josey Wales turned a tidy profit at the box office and premiered to rapturous acclaim, it was only natural that Eastwood would consider a sequel.
Consider it was all he did, though, with the actor and filmmaker eventually going off the idea. Shortly after the publication of 1978’s Watch for Me on the Mountain, a novel about Geronimo, Carter was asked if Eastwood was still interested in another film, and when he answered by saying, “I think Clint’s had all he can take of me,” that was about the end of it.
The author did suggest that “Robert Duvall kinda looks more like my Josey,” but he didn’t step in for Eastwood, either. Instead, in 1986, veteran character actor and Quentin Tarantino’s lucky charm, Michael Parks, directed his one and only feature when he took over the title role and stepped behind the camera for The Return of Josey Wales, which barely played in cinemas before releasing on home video.
Needless to say, it wasn’t a patch on the original. History will always remember The Outlaw Josey Wales as a movie that got a sequel, but it got one in the worst, Eastwood-less way possible.
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