Scott Eastwood doesn’t like to talk about his dad that much. And you can kinda see why – when your dad is Hollywood royalty, you must get sick of the endless questions.
His dad, of course, is Clint Eastwood. Multiple Oscar-winning director Clint Eastwood. Star of some of the greatest Westerns ever made Clint Eastwood.
And his son Scott is just making that shift from actor to movie star. He appeared opposite Taylor Swift in her 2015 music video for Wildest Dreams, had smaller roles in Suicide Squad (2016) and The Fate of the Furious (2017), and is now about to star opposite Star Wars‘ John Boyega in Pacific Rim Uprising, the sequel to Guillermo del Toro‘s 2013 sci-fi cult fave.
So when he was in town for the Pacific Rim Uprising press junket – stage managed affairs where you get anywhere from 3 to 7 minutes with a celebrity, doing a dance where they do their best to promote an upcoming film and you try and get a unique quote or two – I was warned that he probably didn’t want to talk about his dad anymore.
But in the end, it was Scott who brought him up.
“Maybe [the best piece of advice I’ve been given in dealing with fame] is follow your instincts,” he told me, adding that it was his dad who imparted that wisdom.
“Probably listen,” he continued. “Shut up and listen.”
Scott, who started out acting under his mum’s maiden name Scott Clinton Reeves, doesn’t think being Hollywood royalty has helped or hindered his career (although it’s certainly a talking point loved by media).
“You just gotta go out and keep putting yourself out there, and try and audition for movies,” he said. “No one can help you in the audition room.”
He uh… may or may not have tricked me into thinking that his dad was in the film.
Eastwood plays Nate Lambert in Pacific Rim Uprising, the handsome, straight-edge Jaeger pilot to Boyega’s rebel, dragged-back-in-to-this-mess pilot. A “Jaeger“, by the way, is a gigantic humanoid mecha so large they have to be piloted by at least two people working in perfect synchronisation. They were designed (inexplicably, in my opinion) to fight off the gigantic alien “Kaiju“, sea monsters entering Earth through an inter-dimensional portal on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Why? I have no idea. I asked this question on Twitter and the most popular response was “because it’s fucken’ cool”. Touché.
Pacific Rim Uprising comes out in Australia March 22; catch the trailer below.
