“Bobby suffers, Clint yawns”: Clint Eastwood Was Decimated After Being Called Inferior To Robert De Niro
Sergio Leone compared Clint Eastwood to a block of marble!
SUMMARY
- Clint Eastwood ruled the Western genre as an actor before entering the field of directing.
- He had a strained relationship with director Sergio Leone, who compared him to a block of marble in a 1984 interview.
- Leone also praised Robert De Niro as an actor, but Eastwood’s perfectionism became heavy for the actor.
Clint Eastwood was once a veteran actor who later entered the field of directing. Starring alongside other notable actors, Eastwood has had his fair share of enemies and jealousies with other actors and directors throughout the years.
Working alongside director Sergio Leone in the 1966 film The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Clint Eastwood had grown to resent the director by the end of the filming. In his later years, Leone would go on to compare Eastwood with a block of marble while hailing Robert De Niro as an actor!
When Sergio Leone Compared Clint Eastwood To A Block of Marble!
Arguably becoming famous for starring in Western spaghetti movies, Clint Eastwood essentially became famous for portraying the role of Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy. The actor, however, was fed up with working with Leone by the end of the 1966 film.
Being very tight around his films, Eastwood learned his sense of perfectionism from Leone himself. However, the trait became heavy for the actor when the director behaved very strictly in his movies. After starring in 1966’s The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Clint Eastwood never worked with Sergio Leone again. In a 1984 interview with American Film, Leone went on to compare Eastwood to a block of marble!
“Robert De Niro throws himself into this or that role, putting on a personality the way someone else might put on his coat, naturally and with elegance, while Clint Eastwood throws himself into a suit of armor and lowers the visor with a rusty clang.”
The director further continued,
“Eastwood moves like a sleepwalker between explosions and hails of bullets, and he is always the same — a block of marble. Bobby, first of all, is an actor. Clint, first of all, is a star. Bobby suffers, Clint yawns.”
Although his character of Man with No Name became iconically famous, the mysterious persona around the character wasn’t always so. It was actually Clint Eastwood who came up with that idea but had to argue with Sergio Leone in the process!
Clint Eastwood Had To Argue With Sergio Leone
Before the iconic character of Man with No Name was created, Italian director Sergio Leone had a different idea in mind. Giving the character dialogues and a backstory to explain his motives, it was Eastwood who advised the director to go the other way. Eastwood revealed in an interview with Ric Gentry (via Slash Film) how the iconic character finally came to be.
“Sergio argued with me, though he did agree in a way, but it was just much harder for the Italian mentality to accept. They’re just used to so much more exposition and I was throwing that out.”
Well, it seems that Eastwood eventually won over and the Man with No Name came to be. As for the strained relationship between the actor and Sergio Leone, the duo never worked together after 1966.
