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Sun 2 November 2025 19:15, UK
Most of the time, casting is a crapshoot, with the perfect marriage of performer and part one of the industry’s rarest and elusive feats. Clint Eastwood should know that better than most, since he’s played two of cinema’s most iconic characters, and he wasn’t the first choice for either of them.
When Sergio Leone was looking for his ‘Man with No Name’, he wanted James Coburn. The actor’s salary demands were out of his price range, so he settled on Rawhide‘s Rowdy Yates to headline A Fistful of Dollars instead, which catapulted Eastwood from small-screen fame to international stardom, yielding one of cinema’s greatest trilogies in the bargain.
He wasn’t the first, second, or even third choice to play Harry Callahan, either, with John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, and Paul Newman all turning down Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry for one reason or another. Once again, Eastwood was the biggest beneficiary, turning the antiheroic cop into a household name and securing himself a profitable franchise.
With 40 features to his name as a director, the four-time Academy Award winner knows how to assemble a solid ensemble. Eastwood isn’t driven by how popular they are, how well they fare at the box office, or how much they’re going to cost him; he seeks out the best people for the parts, and since he’s Clint Eastwood, nobody in their right mind is going to turn him down.
Like a lot of his pictures, most of which were helmed by Steven Spielberg, 2019’s Richard Jewell originated with another filmmaker. Paul Greengrass was in negotiations to direct the biographical drama with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill producing, and the latter eying the title role, but when that fell through the cracks, Eastwood picked it up.
His biggest challenge was finding the right person to embody Jewell, the hero who went through hell after being named as a suspect by the FBI during the investigation into the Olympic Park bombing that he’d prevented from causing more death and destruction after alerting the authorities to a suspicious package. Hill has two Oscar nominations, but he feels all wrong for it.
Once Eastwood caught wind of Paul Walter Hauser, who’s continued evolving into one of Hollywood’s most unsung character actors, his mind was made up. “Somebody said to me, ‘Did you see I, Tonya?’ And I had, I loved that picture,” he told The Toronto Sun. “And then someone suggested Paul, and I remembered him.”
“He looked like Richard Jewell, and later on, when I went through all the material on Richard Jewell, he seemed right,” the legend explained. “So I met him, and I came away thinking, ‘Shit, this guy was born to play this’. He looks like he could be his twin. So we found Paul, and then we started to think about who else could be great in it, and it just fell together in a matter of weeks.”
Hauser is excellent as Jewell, but he didn’t make a splash during awards season. Kathy Bates was the only cast member nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe, while the film bombed at the box office and weathered more controversy than the usual Eastwood flick. Still, he was right; the leading man was born to play it.
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