“I had no one to blame”: the worst thing Clint Eastwood ever did for a movie would “gag a maggot”
Actors are no strangers to suffering for their art, but the worst thing Clint Eastwood ever did for a movie was something he brought on himself, and he ended up in so deep that he was obligated to do it again.
Not that the actor was a glutton for punishment, he merely underestimated how much he’d hate a character-driven flourish that became iconic. He could have said no, he could have tried to talk his way out of it, but like a real trooper, he sucked it up and made it an intrinsic part of his onscreen mythos.
Unlike certain other Harrison Fords who won’t be named here, Eastwood has managed to navigate a career overflowing with action-oriented films without suffering any major injuries, with a dislocated shoulder after falling off a horse on the set of Pale Rider about as bad as it’s ever gotten.
For some stars, risking life and limb in the name of a dangerous stunt is the worst thing they’ve ever done in the name of cinema. For Nicolas Cage, it was eating a live cockroach. In Eastwood’s case, it was another dangerous habit, one that he didn’t even partake in away from the cameras, which makes his decision all the more questionable.
When quizzed on the most off-putting scenario he’s ever encountered in a legendary seven-decade career, the four-time Academy Award winner didn’t even flinch. “You know, I’d have to say those cigars I smoked for Leone,” he answered, and as impossible as it is to imagine the ‘Man with No Name’ without them, it was a mistake the star regretted making.
“Those cigars were so ugly,” he raged. “I didn’t smoke; I just picked them because they looked right. Boy, they were godawful. They’d gag a maggot.” Since he was the one at fault, having selected the brand and stuck with them throughout the Dollars trilogy, it was nobody else’s fault but his own.
“I had no one to blame,” he acknowledged. “They looked great. They were so long and narrow; they had a strip of bamboo run through them. I’d pull the bamboo out, cut them in pieces, and carry about three or four in my pocket so I’d have different lengths at all times. Whatever the scene called for, I’d have it.”
The cigars became so intertwined with the ‘Man with No Name’ that Eastwood had no choice but to smoke them in the second and third instalments of the Dollars trilogy, despite dreading every scene where he was required to have one hanging out of his mouth. “As soon as the take was over,” he recalled. “You can bet that cigar was under my foot.”
Still, you can’t say it didn’t make him look cool as fuck. Would the mysterious protagonist have been less cool had he not been a smoker? Probably not, but Eastwood was left wishing that he was, since he couldn’t get rid of them fast enough whenever Leone called cut.
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