Clint Eastwood had a pretty weird Rawhide audition

Eastwood won the role in a pretty unconventional manner.

June 3, 2024, 10:54AM By MeTV Staff

CBS Television Distribution

As an actor, Clint Eastwood was lucky to find a role so similar to himself in Rowdy Yates of Rawhide.

In an interview with The Philadelphia Daily News, Eastwood said that he found a lot of similarities between himself and the character, a journey that began with a fairly unconventional audition process for Rawhide.

"You could say I know Rowdy pretty well," Eastwood said. "He is a lot like me. I guess he must be because I did a pretty weird test for the role. It was set up for the actor testing to come running into camera range, and then suddenly blow his stack at nobody."

"Well, there was a lot of dialogue, and I didn't have it all memorized," he said. "So I came running in and improvised."

While Eastwood had talent, he wasn't sure that the acting choice would necessarily win him the role, especially given the reactions of those involved in casting.

"I saw the producer look at me kind of strangely," he said. "I figured I didn't have a chance. Then I watched another actor do the scene word for word. I went home and told my wife I didn't have a chance. She said, 'I bet you get it.' She was right."

In an interview with The Buffalo News, Eastwood also said that his career as a whole had been fairly unconventional. In fact, his career as an actor began as an accident. "I went to see a friend at Universal-International. He took me around the lot. I met a cameraman, Irving Glassberg, who thought I had screen possibilities, and he got the studio interested. They did a quick test of me. Two weeks later they phoned me to come out again. Then they signed me."

Luckily, the production crew and Rawhide were supportive of Eastwood's improvisational nature, especially considering how well the actor understood the role.

"We very rarely play a scene word for word," Eastwood said. "Usually the writers don't like having their dialogue changed. We've got a very understanding group, though, and they don't object. When you have a lot of writers turning in their scripts, it's never their fault if the dialogue doesn't fit the character."