“I really wanted James Coburn”: the iconic role nobody wanted Clint Eastwood to play
It’s been a long time since a filmmaker or producer has even contemplated turning their nose up at the idea of either working with Clint Eastwood or hiring him to lead one of their movies, but it took the actor a while to reach that point in his career.
By the early 1960s, he was finally starting to become recognisable to mainstream audiences thanks to his recurring role in the TV series Rawhide, but making the jump from the small screen to sustained cinematic success remained agonisingly out of reach for a star who was also trying to outrun the shadow of typecasting.
He’d landed his big break in a western, and the genre remained one of the most popular among the ticket-buying public, but Eastwood never saw his long-term future in the medium. He hadn’t made a single feature since debuting as part of the Rawhide ensemble in 1959, which meant that his first port of call had the potential to define his future.
The last movie he made before taking his talents to television was a western, 1958’s Ambush at Cimarron Pass, and the first he starred in during his Rawhide days also fit the bill. However, as a western made by an Italian filmmaker and shot in Spain, there was something different about Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars.
Of course, everyone knows that it was the ‘Man with No Name’ that strapped a rocket to Eastwood and set him off on a trajectory that eventually brought him to the very summit of Hollywood as both an actor and director, but he only ended up with the role because nobody else seemed remotely interested in playing it.
Leone admitted as much when he confessed, “I really wanted James Coburn, but he was too expensive.” That barely even scratched the surface of the auteur’s wish list, with Coburn just one of many names who declined the opportunity to headline what would turn out to be an influential and transformative picture in more ways than one.
Henry Fonda was at the top of the list, and he said no. Charles Bronson knocked it back, as did lesser-known names like Henry Silva, Rory Calhoun, Tony Russel, Richard Harrison, and Ty Hardin. Bodybuilder and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s idol Steve Reeves was another who refused to be the ‘Man with No Name’, and he didn’t even regret it.
“I personally thought, how could an Italian director make a good western out of a Japanese samurai film?” he asked The Perfect Vision of the unofficial Yojimbo remake. “So I turned it down on that basis. That was the first western in Italy, and it turned out quite well. I wouldn’t have felt real good smoking a little cigar and squinting my eyes for three months. Frankly, Clint Eastwood was much better for it than I would have been.”
That would be something of an understatement, considering Eastwood ended up owing his entire career to A Fistful of Dollars, which only came about because Leone was relatively low on funds and everybody he’d approached beforehand turned their nose up at the movie. It may have been born of necessity and rejection, but the actor and filmmaker instantly proved to be a match made in heaven.
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