When we think of Clint Eastwood and the rich array of iconic cinematic characters he’s known for, we associate the macho man more with ‘anti-heroes’ than we do traditional heroes. Indeed, what it was that made the Man with No Name from the Dollars trilogy so intriguing, or the iconic badass cop Dirty Harry so compelling, was that they eschewed the conventional values of the hero and defied standard categories of morality to get the job done.
The gallery of gritty, hardened and no-nonsense characters that Eastwood played was far removed from the idealistic, goody-two-shoes heroes that adorned the pages of wartime paperbacks and comic books. You could even go so far as to say that Eastwood’s men were the antithesis of, say, Superman – which makes it all the more interesting that he could have actually portrayed the first live-action man of steel.
An Eastwood Superman is a somewhat complex image to come to terms with, but according to the man himself, it nearly happened. Decades after the incident, the actor would recall in an interview with the Los Angeles Times: “I can remember – and this was many years ago – when [Warner Bros. President] Frank Wells came to me about doing Superman.”
Eastwood continued, “So it could have happened. This was when they first started to think about making it. I was like, ‘Superman? Nah, nah, that’s not for me.’ Not that there’s anything wrong with it. It’s for somebody, but not me.” It’s evident that Eastwood had the self-awareness to acknowledge that he and the pure-hearted Krypton weren’t the best pairing. Besides, the actor was more comfortable playing more “grounded” characters.
“I always liked characters that were more grounded in reality,” he said. “Maybe they do super things or more-than-human things — like Dirty Harry, he has a knack for doing crazy things, or the western guys — but, still, they’re not caped crusaders.” Typecasting was another concern, as the actor explained, “You get a role like that, and it locks you in a bit. True, I had the western genre and the Dirty Harry role, but everybody made westerns and did cop movies; they didn’t seem as bad [for typecasting the actors].”
In the end, the part for the 1978 movie would go to Christopher Reeves, whose clean-cut all-American image would become so iconic and synonymous that, for multiple generations, he’s still considered the definitive Supe. It was just as Eastwood predicted, who said, “That was part of the consideration, a big part. Look at Reeve; he was excellent. That was a big factor.”
Interestingly, rather than a blanket lack of interest in all things superhero, Eastwood did, in fact, have a particular affinity for one of the genre’s slightly less well-known figures – and it was a Marvel character, too. Praising their equivalent of Aquaman, Eastwood explained, “The Sub-Mariner, that’s the one I always liked. I had all of those comics when I was a kid.” Whether he enjoyed the recent live-action version of the aquatic hero or not, we’ve yet to find out.