When Clint Eastwood started a fight to teach his actors a lesson: “They start smacking each other around”

Posted On December 10, 2024December 10, 2024

Nobody can outrun the sands of time, but Clint Eastwood remained capable of brawling long after his days as one of cinema’s most iconic action stars had drawn to a close.

The actor and filmmaker became an icon by punching, shooting, glaring, and barrelling his way through his adversaries in films like Sergio Leone’s seminal Dollars trilogy, The Outlaw Josey Wales, the Dirty Harry franchise, Unforgiven, and In the Line of Fire to name a few, so Eastwood evidently knows a thing or two about how to make onscreen violence look as real as possible.

With that in mind, he wouldn’t settle for anything less than the utmost authenticity when one of his directorial efforts required two actors to start brawling. From his perspective, they weren’t anywhere near as convincing as he’d like them to be, so he took it upon himself to give them a lesson on stage combat.

It wasn’t even on a picture that had anything resembling an action sequence, either, but a biographical drama. 2011’s J Edgar doesn’t immediately come across as the type of film where Eastwood would grow so exasperated with his ensemble that he halted production to show them a thing or two about throwing punches, but he did it anyway.

The four-time Academy Award winner was in his 80s when cameras started rolling, not that it stopped him from showing the younger generations a thing or two. Leonardo DiCaprio has been in a few simulated punch-ups in his time, but even he wasn’t above sitting under Eastwood’s learning tree, not that he had a choice when it unfolded almost completely spontaneously.

“Clint was there with one of his stunt guy friends, Buddy Van Horn, and they put on an impromptu fight scene for us,” DiCaprio explained to The Hollywood Reporter. “There’s Buddy standing in the middle of the room, and Clint says, ‘I think it should be something like this’, and he explodes into Clint Eastwood the fighter.”

DiCaprio and co-star Armie Hammer couldn’t do much else than watch the two older gentlemen going hammer and tongs right in front of them, which must have been a strange experience. “They start smacking each other around and rolling on the floor,” the actor recalled. “And then Clint just gets up and says, ‘OK, something like that.’”

To be fair, Eastwood has likely forgotten more about acting and filmmaking than most performers could ever hope to learn, even if DiCaprio discovered first-hand that the best way to brawl for the cameras wasn’t one of them. Despite his octogenarian status, he had no issues rolling around like a man half his age to instruct his actors on the exact way he wanted it done.

It was on-the-job learning for DiCaprio and something he needed to grasp quickly unless the rest of the day’s schedule be wasted on Eastwood and Van Horn repeatedly going toe-to-toe until the right way to fight was drummed into the cast.

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