The legendary 1988 movie Clint Eastwood wanted nothing to do with: “Which was a shock”
When you look back at some of the characters Clint Eastwood has played onscreen, he isn’t lacking in iconic roles and legendary movies, but he could have easily added a few more to the docket.
That’s not to say that it would have been a good idea for him to play every big-name part that was offered his way, since the prospect of watching him wear his underpants on the outside to fly around on wires in 1978’s Superman sounds as stupid then as it does now.
The same goes for James Bond, since the distinctly British secret agent would have jumped clear over the shark had he been played by the Californian with cinema’s most famous thousand-yard stare. Eastwood has a persona, and he’s largely stuck to it, but there are other missed opportunities that you could easily imagine him thriving in.
Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West is the most obvious example, since it was a classic western helmed by a director who’d already made three classic westerns with Eastwood in the lead, but at that point in his career, he wanted to spread his wings beyond the genre that made him a star, which he’d frequently return to in the years to come.
In the 1980s, the future four-time Academy Award winner was still recognised as one of Hollywood’s most bankable action stars, even with the Arnold Schwarzeneggers and Sylvester Stallones of the world convincing audiences that looking like a kilt sock full of golf balls was the ideal physical form for running and gunning on the silver screen.
Ironically, it was an everyman who redefined the genre to a much greater extent than those beefy lads. Your over-muscled meatheads can fuck right off, because 1988’s Die Hard introduced John McClane to the masses, with Bruce Willis becoming an overnight A-lister for bringing one of action cinema’s greatest-ever protagonists to unforgettable life.
Nobody wanted to play the part, though, including Eastwood. Co-writer Jeb Stuart revealed that he was the first person 20th Century Fox approached for the gig, but he immediately turned it down because he didn’t get the humour. “Which, to me, was a shock,” the scribe admitted. “Because if you listen to a lot of those words, Eastwood’s one of the few people who could have delivered a line like, ‘Come to LA, have a great time.'”
“You could see him doing that,” Stuart maintained, with McClane initially scripted as an Eastwood surrogate: “He was my inspiration.” Despite informing the character, the ‘Man with No Name’ didn’t want to be the ‘Man Who Saves the Nakatomi Christmas Party From Disaster’, and his loss wouldn’t be so much Willis’ gain, but the backbone for the second-billed star of Moonlighting to build their entire big-screen career.
The shadow of Die Hard still looms large over action movies today, almost 40 years after its release, and while a lot of its enduring appeal has to do with Willis’ performance as McClane, you don’t have to squint like Eastwood to imagine the actor and filmmaker dropping quips and bodies while giving terrorists the run-around and saving his failing marriage at the same time.
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