MOVIE NEWS – Die Hard screenwriter Jeb Stuart has revealed that Clint Eastwood’s reluctance to take the role was not a coincidence.

No one denies that Clint Eastwood has had a fantastic career in the film industry as both an actor and director, but the what-if question has always been how different Die Hard would have been if he had taken the role of John McClane instead of legendary Dirty Harry actor Bruce Willis. Jeb Stuart, the screenwriter of Die Hard, revealed in a recent interview with SlashFilm that Eastwood didn’t want to take the role, and it came as a shock to the writer.

Although Clint Eastwood was the first actor to be offered the role of the now iconic New York cop who just wanted a quiet Christmas, he wasn’t the only big name star to turn it down. Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson were among the others to turn down the role, and Eastwood’s stature as an actor at the time was reflected in the fact that he was the first star to be offered the part. Amikor arról van szó, hogy miért utasította vissza, Stuart elárulta, hogy az egész azért történt, mert “nem értette a film humorát”. The writer said:

“Clint Eastwood was approached first. Ironically, his response to the producers was ‘I don’t get the humour’. Which was shocking to me, because if you listen to a lot of those lines, Eastwood is one of the few people who could have delivered a line like ‘Come to LA, have a good time’. All that kind of stuff. You could see him doing that. He was my inspiration.”

Clint Eastwood, playing John McClane instead of Bruce Willis, could have made or broken the role.

The film industry is full of countless questions about what would have happened if other actors had been cast in certain roles. While some of these have been resolved over the years due to circumstances, such as the possible casting of frontrunner Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future, there are others, such as the possible casting of Clint Eastwood as John McClane, that we will never see. That’s why it’s hard to decide whether the charisma and macho appeal of the legendary western and action movie star would have brought something better to the role, or taken away everything that made the film iconic.

As one of the most beloved action films of all time, Die Hard didn’t suffer too much from Bruce Willis taking the lead role instead. Mintha a film nem kapott volna elég figyelmet azért, mert egy nagyszerű akciófilm, akkor a “karácsonyi filmként” való állandó vitája pótolja a különbséget, és biztosítja, hogy a Die Hard mindig csak egy rövid időre van attól, hogy ott legyen minden közösségi médiában minden idők legjobb ünnepi filmjeiről szóló vitában. One thing’s for sure, if Eastwood had taken the role, he probably wouldn’t have been able to release as many sequels as the much younger Willis, and that would have deprived the world of a lot of yippee-ki-yay fans.

Source: Slashfilm