As an actor, Clint Eastwood was not an instant success. He was almost 25, and an army veteran, husband, and father, before he booked his first role, which he landed less through acting talent than by being tall and handsome. In the 1955 3D monster movie Revenge of the Creature—specifically, the creature from the black lagoon—he played an uncredited lab technician named Jennings, who’s initially unaware that he has a rat in his pocket.
“Uncredited” was a common theme among Eastwood’s early roles, many of which were bit parts in B movies, Westerns, or worse, TV Westerns. His first big break came in that last category, when in 1959 he landed the role of Rowdy Yates, the second-billed cowboy on Rawhide. Eastwood played Yates in more than 200 episodes over the next several years, but he had to leave the country to become a bona fide star. Not until Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name spaghetti Western trilogy was released in the U.S. in 1967 did Eastwood start sniffing real fame and acclaim.
As a director, though, he got great notices from the start. (Granted, it probably helped that people had heard of him.) Eastwood wasn’t allowed to direct any Rawhide episodes, so he first worked behind the camera (while continuing to star in front of it) in 1971’s Play Misty for Me, which came out two months before he’d ask a punk if he felt lucky in Dirty Harry. “Eastwood is passable as an actor, but better as a director,” wrote one Misty reviewer. John Cassavetes, an experienced actor-director himself, told Eastwood, “The only thing wrong with the film was that it didn’t have Hitchcock’s name on it.” Roger Ebert, who gave the film his max of four stars, called Eastwood’s directorial debut “a good beginning,” observing that “he must have learned a lot during 17 years of working for other directors.” Ebert was surprised, upon meeting Eastwood, to find him “personally fascinated by the art and craft of the movies.” Another critic, who said Misty “does show talent in Eastwood as a director” and “could argue well for things to come,” nonetheless noted, “No one will be running after Eastwood with Oscar nominations in their hands.”
Not that time, no. But eventually they would—11 times, in fact, with all but two of those nominations rewarding his work as a director. Four of those times—when he received nominations for Best Picture and Best Director for Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby—the Academy not only ran after Eastwood, but caught up to him and handed him the hardware. Not bad for a guy whose first directing credit came at age 41, when at last his picture could appear in the paper with the coveted caption “actor and director.”
No one today would dream of ID’ing the now-94-year-old Eastwood as anything but both—and some might flip the order. This century, he’s directed 19 movies and acted in only seven, all but one of which he also directed. He’s experimented, too, via a World War II movie shot in Japanese, from the Japanese perspective (Letters From Iwo Jima); his first musical as a director (Jersey Boys); and a dramatized reenactment of a heroic event that starred the real-life heroes (The 15:17 to Paris). And Eastwood is still bolstering his résumé: His 40th directorial effort, Juror No. 2, came out in theaters last month.
By “theaters,” we mean a few dozen domestic theaters in major markets; Juror No. 2 received an extremely limited big-screen release, which was lambasted both as an affront to a legend and as a financial miscalculation, considering Clint’s track record as a reliable earner. According to Warner Bros., Eastwood’s standard distributor for almost 50 years, it was always the plan—endorsed by the director—for the film to be primarily a streaming affair, preceded at most by a brief box-office run to build buzz. Regardless, the rest of the country can see Juror No. 2 now—or, at least, the portion of the country that subscribes to Max, where the movie premiered on Friday.
Eastwood’s latest movie may be his last (though he hasn’t said so). And even if the Academy doesn’t run after him with Oscar nominations for Juror No. 2, this wouldn’t be a bad way to go out: Among Eastwood joints, Juror No. 2’s 93 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating trails only those of High Plains Drifter and Unforgiven. The tale of a juror who realizes he’s guilty of the crime the defendant is on trial for features a few too many lingering, freighted-with-meaning shots of Lady Justice statues, but Eastwood’s understated, evenhanded touch helps ground the film’s far-fetched setup and center ethical questions while preserving the pulpy suspense.
Given that this courtroom and jury-room thriller could be a career capper, let’s take the opportunity to highlight an aspect of Eastwood’s career that Juror No. 2 can’t capture on its own: his two-way greatness. Eastwood’s latest movie bolsters an already strong case that he is the greatest actor-director of all time.
To tackle this question, we gathered acting and directing data for thousands of stars and filmmakers from The Movie Database. We focused only on films and excluded documentaries, kids movies, and voice-overs. We also gave half credit to codirectors. On the acting side, we included a performance only if it was billed as one of the movie’s top three parts (mostly to avoid an excess of director cameos that would skew the stats). Finally, we filtered out any movies with fewer than 100 user ratings (to trim tiny direct-to-video movies whose directors cast themselves, as well as student films), any directors with fewer than 10 acting roles (to omit those who may have merely moonlighted as actors, or recent arrivals, from GOAT consideration), and anyone who ranked outside the top 10,000 in TMDB’s popularity rating. Then we ranked the remaining directors by harmonic mean, a measurement that reflects both how busy they were and how well balanced their credit distribution was between acting and directing. (Someone with a 60/40 acting-directing credit split, for instance, would have a higher harmonic mean than someone with a 90/10 split.)
The Actor-Director Dozen: Most Prolific and Balanced Acting-Directing Careers
Going by this metric, Clint clears. Not only does he have the most qualifying credits, but he also has a nearly even split between acting and directing. Among the members of this list, only Woody Allen has more directing credits than Eastwood, and Allen doesn’t have nearly as many acting credits. Conversely, only Jackie Chan and (barely) Sylvester Stallone have more acting credits, and neither of them has nearly as many directing credits. (If you’re wondering where some other prominent actor-directors are—Cassavetes, John Huston, Mel Brooks, Sydney Pollack, Laurence Olivier—they didn’t quite clear the bar for top-billed qualifying movie roles or have enough total credits or popularity to join this upper echelon.)
In this case, quantity is a decent proxy for quality: One wouldn’t keep getting this many acting and directing gigs in feature films without talent. But we’ve also displayed the average user rating of the movies each filmmaker directed or acted in. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Orson Welles have Eastwood beat in that department, but across far fewer films.
(Clearly, directing has historically been skewed heavily toward men—and that gender bias remains strong. Angelina Jolie and Jodie Foster, who have four qualifying directing credits apiece, are the only woman to make the top 30 on the acting-directing leaderboard, without much room to spare; Mélanie Laurent, Elizabeth Banks, and Julie Delpy appear on the top 40, with four directing credits each but fewer acting credits than Jolie and Foster.)
Since we’re comparing career accomplishments, Eastwood’s persuasive claim to the GOAT title obviously owes a lot to his longevity. He may have been a late bloomer, but he’s more than made up for any early lost time on the back end: 68 percent of Eastwood’s directorial credits have come after he turned 60, and 48 percent after he turned 70. (Cassavetes didn’t live to see 60.)
It helps that Eastwood works fast. Efficient as one-take Clint is, though, he wouldn’t have the high placement he enjoys here without almost 70 years of Hollywood staying power. He’ll be tough to overtake at the top of this leaderboard, if only because few actor-directors survive into their mid-90s, let alone keep cranking out good movies at that age. Thus, Eastwood’s exalted status can be chalked up partly to luck and good health, not just skill. But then, that’s true of almost any all-time great.
Because this leaderboard is composed mostly of active old-timers and long-ago luminaries, one might wonder whether the prolific actor-director is a dying breed. After all, many professional fields, from science to sports, have tended toward specialization, which is why we marvel at the exploits of Shohei Ohtani in baseball and Travis Hunter in football. They’re special, in part, because their broad-based skill sets seem so anachronistic.
In moviemaking, this turns out not to be true: Actor-directors are actually becoming more common, as actors seek stability and creative control in a movie industry that’s smaller than it once was but also less rigidly run than the old studio system. Another contemporary Play Misty for Me reviewer, who thought the movie “should establish Eastwood’s reputation as a talented director,” cited the 1971 directorial debuts of Jack Lemmon (Kotch) and Jack Nicholson (Drive, He Said), along with Eastwood’s, as evidence that “movie actors have become directors with a frequency that suggests a minor revolution in the film industry.” Reminiscing about Misty in the early 2000s for a book about directors, Eastwood said, “At that time not a lot of actors were directing films.”
Our data set may be slightly skewed by the influence of TMDB’s popularity metric, which favors more recent film figures and thus may artificially suppress the totals for earlier eras, but it does seem to support the idea that Eastwood was at the forefront of a trend:
This uptick isn’t just a function of more movies coming out. The trend holds true on a percentage basis, too:
In other words, we may have entered a golden age of the Hollywood double threat. That doesn’t mean that one of today’s younger actor-directors will one day equal Eastwood’s stats, but it does suggest that there are plenty of people to whom he could pass the torch. John Krasinski has four qualified director roles and 13 qualified actor roles. At the same age, Eastwood was at four and 17, respectively. Ben Affleck is at five director roles and 42 actor roles, compared to nine and 26 at the same age for Eastwood. Greta Gerwig, at three and 13, is ahead of Eastwood’s one and 12 (and she also boasts the highest average rating of anyone in our sample with three or more director credits). Tyler Perry lacks the sterling reviews, but at age 55, he’s well ahead of Eastwood’s pace as a director.
Banks, Bradley Cooper, Olivia Wilde, Natalie Portman, George Clooney, Sean Penn (who won Best Actor for Eastwood’s Mystic River), Andy Serkis, Michael B. Jordan; there’s a long list of possible challengers or spiritual successors. It wouldn’t be wise to wager on any one of them overtaking Eastwood, but a bet on the field wouldn’t be the worst idea—assuming that in-person movie attendance doesn’t decline further and cause the industry’s overall output to crater. It’s all tough to project, not only because of Hollywood’s upheaval but also because career paths can take sudden swerves. Compared to actors, directors tend to get late starts—often after learning the ropes from mentors, as Eastwood did from Leone and Don Siegel (the latter of whom also played a small part in Play Misty for Me). Then they tail off more slowly: Actors peak around age 40, while directors peak around 50. Clint, of course, broke the scale.
If you’d told the 41-year-old Eastwood, fresh off of Misty, that he’d direct 40 films, he might have squinted and scowled. (Even more than usual.) “A few people would try it once or twice, and then they’d get out of it really quick once they found out what it entailed,” Eastwood recalled a few decades on, about actors who dabbled in directing. “I thought it was going to be a one-time deal; I thought maybe I would do it later, when I got to be a certain age and I didn’t want to act anymore. That way I’d have something else going for me. But one thing has led to another.”
And another … and another … and another. Energizer Eastwood should feel lucky: No one has ever been better at combining both of his jobs. A man’s got to know his limitations—unless he has fewer than anyone else.
