Clint Eastwood is in my opinion the only living (and working for that matter) Hollywood icon left of his generation. I’m sorry, but today’s A-listers just aren’t the same. Eastwood has the star quality that only the greats had.

Once upon a time the western was the big action genre, filling young boys hearts with a burning passion to pick up a toy gun and shoot their friends. Nowadays the place in the hearts and minds of our children has been taken up by superheroes. We are experiencing a superhero boom at the moment and while we may well be heading towards a superhero recession, it has yet to hit. So what if Clint was still in his prime? Where would the hero of yesteryear fit into today’s spandex clad, muscle suit wearing geek fests?

Here are 5 characters that Clint Eastwood would not only be amazing as, but should have played had there been any justice in the world.

 

5. Allan Quatermain

Excuse my profanity but f*** Sean Connery. It wasn’t his fault The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was shit, but he damn well helped! Alan Moore’s Victorian ensemble of popular literary characters from the 1880s and 1890s took legendary sharpshooter Quatermain from H. Rider Haggard’s novel King Solomon’s Mines and put him in an adventure with Captain Nemo, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Mina Harker (Dracula) and The Invisible Man. While the film version is to cinema what 3rd degree burns are to your complexion, the graphic novels are a totally original take on some of the greatest literary characters ever created.

Who could play a drunk, old and past-it gunslinger like Clint? Yes OK, he isn’t English but neither was Sean Connery and unlike him, Clint would probably work on the accent rather than play everything as Shcotish. The reason Clint would be so good is because he has the gravitas that so many actors don’t have. He is the one of the only actors in film history who doesn’t blink when they fire a gun……..that’s bad ass. He is also really good at playing characters who hate the world around them and that is Allan Quatermain. He is a professional hunter who has come to love Africa and hates the part he plays in destroying it, yet has no other option for a living.

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