The movie repeatedly ground to a halt by a hungry Clint Eastwood: “You hear this light crunch”
For most actors in Hollywood, working with Clint Eastwood is a bucket list item. After all, the nonagenarian actor and director is so indelible a part of the movie business that it’s a wonder his face hasn’t already been carved into Mount Lee beside the Hollywood sign.
Eastwood has seen and done it all over a 70-year career, and he’s still directing films well into his 90s. The man has a seemingly insatiable hunger to tell motion picture stories—although it was his real-life hunger that kept grinding a recent production to a halt.
When Nicholas Hoult signed up to play the lead role in Eastwood’s latest film, Juror #2, he described it as a dream come true to work with the icon. He had heard many stories about what Eastwood was like to work with, from his reputation for minimal takes to the idea that he never works long hours to the notion that he doesn’t yell “action” or “cut” on his sets. Amusingly, Hoult told Josh Horowitz of the Happy Sad Confused podcast that all the “Clint-isms” he’d heard about were 100% true – and that was a great thing.
“The really lovely thing about working with Clint Eastwood is a lot of the time you’ll finish at lunchtime,” Hoult revealed. “He doesn’t like to do a lot of takes or spend long days on set, so you’d go in, have breakfast, shoot for maybe six or seven hours, then break for lunch. Normally, on another film, you’d go back after lunch for another six or seven hours.”
With Eastwood, though, Hoult revealed he’d eat lunch with his cast and often even have dessert, then he’d call time on the day, and everyone would go home. Hoult smiled, “It’s a very nice way of working.“
Hilariously, though, one of Hoult’s co-stars revealed that Eastwood wouldn’t just eat at breakfast and lunch – he was also a dedicated snacker. In fact, the Dirty Harry star snacked so often and so loudly that it sometimes disrupted the scenes he was shooting in the film’s quiet courtroom set.
Phil Biedron, who played one of the movie’s jurors, chuckled to Vulture, “We’re in the courtroom, and we’re doing this dramatic scene. And then you hear this light crunch sound. It was actually Clint, who was eating Cheez-Its and making the noise.”
Picture the scene: an entire cast and crew shaken from their work by the loud crunching of their director, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he’s causing the noise that’s distracting everybody and compromising the film’s audio. Biedron couldn’t help thinking, “Anyone else doing that on set would have been a bit iffy.”
As Biedron and everyone else on set figured, though, who were they to say anything to Eastwood? What were they going to do – tell the totemic industry figure who hired them that he’s eating his cheesy snacks too close to the microphones? Instead, Biedron admitted they all said, “Hey, it’s his movie. And he’s a big Cheez-Its guy.”
Ultimately, Hoult didn’t think Eastwood’s voracious taste for crispy cheese crackers negatively affected his time on Juror #2 at all. He told People magazine, “He is cinema in many ways, as an actor, the performances he’s given, the films he’s directed. It’s just magic to be on set with him…I feel very, very lucky.”
When asked what he’d remember the most about his time working with a megastar like Eastwood, he mused, “His allowance for things, his acceptance of good and bad. And also when I could hear him munching Cheez-Its, just off of set.”
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