(Credits: Far Out / TCM)
Sun 1 February 2026 16:45, UK
When Clint Eastwood sets his mind to something, you can be damn sure he’ll do it. Sometimes, it might take him a touch longer than he expected, but he’ll always find a way to get there in the end.
Directing is the most obvious, with the future four-time Academy Award winner first planting that seed during his Rawhide days. Unfortunately, another actor on another TV show was allowed to helm an episode that subsequently went off the rails, forcing him to bide his time for more than a decade.
Even when the opportunity finally rolled around in 1971, when he made his feature-length debut on Play Misty for Me, the studio was utterly bemused as to why Eastwood, who put arses in seats as an action star, wanted to play a regular guy, as if he should be grateful at the idea of being typecast.
As has typically been the case, though, he got the last laugh. He’s undeniably cinema’s greatest-ever double threat, and arguably the only person in Hollywood history who’s become a certified icon on both sides of the camera. You don’t reach that level by backing down, and he’s always been a man of principle.
With that in mind, Eastwood could have made as many Dirty Harry movies as he wanted. The studio was constantly asking him for more, and his action-oriented flicks away from the grizzled cop always fared well at the box office, but he didn’t want the well to run too dry, even if he still made five of them.
Whenever the time came for the leading man to dust off his trusty .44 Magnum, there was always one picture he refused to revisit before reprising the role. “When I was preparing for the sequels, I forbade myself to watch the first one again,” he explained. “I wouldn’t want to reach the point where I am imitating myself. You and I know some filmmakers and actors who are reduced to that.”
It seems odd that Eastwood would ban himself from rewatching Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry as part of his preparations for playing Harry Callahan, but he thought it was the easiest way to avoid turning the character into a self-parody, a trap that many franchise figureheads have fallen into over the years.
That wasn’t the only example, either. “When I started work on Pale Rider, I was tempted to see Josey Wales again, and my first westerns,” he offered. “Then I told myself, ‘No, I can’t do that. There isn’t any connection. The only connection is that it is a western, and there’s a certain mythology associated with that genre. But I don’t want to repeat myself, I don’t want to be influenced by the past.”
Ironically, Eastwood reached the pinnacle of his professional life playing William Munny in Unforgiven, a character who knowingly carried every single ounce of the actor’s baggage from the Dollars trilogy, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider, and more on his back. You can see his point, and it’s one of the reasons why, unlike other silver-screen legends, he never felt the need to wink at this built-in audience.
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