The Truth About CLINT EASTWOOD

THE LEGENDARY ACTOR AND DIRECTOR IS A COMPLEX MAN WHOSE LIFE IS FILLED WITH ENORMOUS CONTRADICTIONS

- LOUISE A. BARILE, Katie Bruno

On the set of 2024’s Juror #2, the film’s star, Nicholas Hoult, asked his director, Clint Eastwood, to explain Clint’s own approach to acting. “He said it’s an emotional and instinctive art form,” the British actor recalls. “So don’t think too much — just do.”

It’s advice the legend has also lived by. In the 70 years since Clint, 95, spoke his first words on film playing a lab assistant in Revenge of the Creature, he’s become one of America’s most prolific — although sometimes underappreciated — actors and directors. Yet despite so many decades in the spotlight, the guiding principles of this deeply private man have never been easy to pin down. “Every time I got a little closer to some aspect of his films or his life, I would be surprised,” Shawn Levy, author of the new book, Clint: The Man and the Movies, tells Closer. “I think the contradictions of Clint continue to fascinate.”

Clint smiled with daughters Morgan, Kathryn and Francesca at The 15:17 to Paris premiere.

Born in San Francisco, Clint grew up in an upwardly mobile family that moved often during his childhood. “He was a tall, quiet, kind of dreamy boy who was always the new kid and always getting picked on,” Levy says. That experience helped inform the stoic, self-reliant characters — like the Man With No Name of the Sergio Leone westerns — Clint would become famous for. “They’re men who show up in a place and alter the social fabric that already exists,” Levy explains. “I think that’s how he sees himself.”

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