At first glance, one of the most iconic stars in Hollywood history would appear to have little in common with a beloved workplace comedy. However, Clint Eastwood ended up having a huge bearing on The Office for the most unexpected of reasons.
Enjoying one of the most decorated careers in cinema on either side of the camera, Eastwood conquered the western as he remoulded it into his own grizzled image. He crafted some of its finest entries with the Dollars trilogy, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Unforgiven, to name just a few, in addition to winning four Academy Awards for his filmmaking efforts and playing a number of iconic characters along the way.
At the completely opposite end of the creative spectrum, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant were largely unknown comedic quantities who used the humdrum backdrop of a paper company to craft one of the most popular and enduring sitcoms of the 21st century. It influenced several localised offshoots and countless other shows despite only lasting for two seasons, 12 episodes, and a pair of Christm as specials.
They couldn’t be more different in virtually every respect, but when it came to drilling down towards the emotional core of the characters, Merchant always had Eastwood in the back of his mind. During an appearance on Films to be Buried With with Brett Goldstein, The Office co-creator laid the groundwork for his tear-stained awakening.
“I’m not so much of a crier, but I do get emotional and well up,” he confessed. “But I do think as I get older, I get more emotional, and I’ve cried in one form or another to the most unlikely things.” Not that he should be ashamed of sobbing openly at one of Eastwood’s most emotional films because he’s far from being in the minority in that respect.
During his time spent working as a reviewer for a local magazine in his early 20s, the young Merchant was dispatched to see 1995’s romantic drama The Bridges of Madison County, which turned out to have a profound impact. “I was thinking, ‘This is not going to be my cup of tea’, but I loved it,” he said. “And in the end, I was really emotional, and I was shedding a tear.”
One of the most memorable storylines in The Office was the ongoing will they/won’t they between Martin Freeman’s Tim and Lucy Davis’ Dawn, which is where that Eastwood association – particularly the way the relationship between his photographer Robert Kincaid and Meryl Streep’s housewife Francesca Johnson unfolded – came in especially handy.
“Funnily enough, that used to be a real reference point for Ricky and I when we were doing The Office,” he explained. “The idea of the Tim and Dawn romance and the sort of bittersweetness of that film, and the kind of feeling of romance slipping away, and it’s very sweetly done.” Plenty of movies and TV shows have taken obvious cues from Eastwood, but this one was a lot more understated, if equally effective.