Parade : September 2021

Macho Man

Screen legend Clint Eastwood on why he’s still making movies at 91, a missed opportunity with Marilyn Monroe and returning to his Western roots with Cry Macho By Mara Reinstein

“I was in New Mexico for nine weeks working on this project during the pandemic,” Clint Eastwood says, referring to his upcoming film Cry Macho, which premieres on HBO Max Sept 17. “When I got back home, I thought, I’m lucky to be here.”

Eastwood, 91, doesn’t take luck lightly. “My career has been so much based upon luck, things falling into place at the right time,” he says. And the Hollywood legend — with more than 70 acting roles and 45 directing credits — refuses to hang up his boots and call it a career. He enjoys working way too much, directing nine films since 2010 alone.

Cry Macho is one of his most personal yet. In addition to directing, he stars as Mike, a washed-up, broken-down rodeo star in the late 1970s who agrees to take on a new assignment for his ex-boss, Howard Polk (Dwight Yoakam): to reunite Polk with his estranged son, Rafa (Eduardo Minett), a young streetwise teen who turned to cockfighting in Mexico — with a rooster named Macho — after his parents’ divorce.

Eastwood enters the picture wearing a cowboy hat, befitting a man who made his mark in Hollywood in the 1959–65 CBS Western series Rawhide (in which he famously played assistant trail boss Rowdy Yates), then took on a fierce turn in the so-called “spaghetti Western” Dollars trilogy as well as a string of other films, including High Plains Drifter, Pale Rider and The Outlaw Josey Wales. Cry Macho, though, marks Eastwood’s first return to the genre since Unforgiven, his 1992 Oscar-winning classic.