Days into his 95th year on Earth, Clint Eastwood is calling a recent interview purportedly with the Oscar winner “entirely phony.”
Eastwood says he was never interviewed by the Austrian publication Kurier for a story that went viral over the weekend due to some firebrand comments made by someone other than Clint Eastwood.
Those comments were aggregated by Reuters and the broader news ecosystem, including, unfortunately, The A.V. Club, despite being fake.
The interview spread far outside the bounds of Kurier’s normal circulation, going viral online with comments deriding current Hollywood trends like remakes and franchise films credited to Eastwood.
“A couple of items about me have recently shown up in the news,” Eastwood said in a statement to Deadline. “I thought I would set the record straight.
“I can confirm I’ve turned 95. I can also confirm that I never gave an interview to an Austrian publication called Kurier, or any other writer in recent weeks, and that the interview is entirely phony.”
The “phony” interview was published on May 30, one day before Eastwood’s birthday.
It features words credited to Eastwood that pine for “the good old days when screenwriters wrote movies like Casablanca in small bungalows on the studio lot.”
Eastwood’s doppleganger continued, “We live in an era of remakes and franchises[…]My philosophy is: do something new or stay home.”
But apparently, that isn’t Eastwood’s philosophy because he says he never gave this interview. But if we had to guess an outcome to this mess, it’s probably going to be some AI bullshit because everything is bad now.
Neither the publication nor the article’s author immediately responded to The A.V. Club‘s request for comment.
(AV Club)
