Pounding nails, working construction, bartending, and valeting cars are run-of-the-mill odd jobs for an aspiring actor trying to make it in Hollywood, but they aren’t the résumé builders you’d expect from screen star scion Scott Eastwood, the 27-year-old son of Dirty Harry. Still, that’s precisely what the younger Eastwood was doing when he graduated from high school, in 2003.
“People assumed that I would have everything handed to me, but that couldn’t be further from the truth,” says the Monterey, California, native, whose mother is Jacelyn Reeves. “I was on my own just doing the grind.” That’s not to say that Eastwood Sr. wasn’t supportive. Scott grew up on his father’s film sets and has had roles in Clint-helmed projects, including Flags of Our Fathers, Gran Torino, and Trouble with the Curve.
“As a director and an actor, my dad’s motto is ‘Tell the truth.’ The only way of doing that is having life experiences and being a storyteller,” Scott says. He hopes to emulate his father, with whom he shares chiseled good looks, in other ways, too. “I want to be a man’s man—not a kid actor or a glitzy pop star but a no-bullshit leading man,” says the T-shirt-and-Vans-wearing Eastwood. He’ll get the chance in his next flicks: The Perfect Wave, in which he plays a surfer looking for, yes, the perfect wave; Dawn Patrol, a gritty blue-collar murder drama in which he plays another surfer; and Fury, a World War II movie he started filming in September with Brad Pitt and Shia LaBeouf.
Off duty, Eastwood spends most of his time surfing and fishing in San Diego, where he has lived since 2008, or having a drink at a watering hole in Solana Beach called Saddle Bar, of which is he a co-owner. “I’m not a club kind of guy,” he says. “Dive bars are much more my thing. They’re no-nonsense.” And though he has graduated from sanding floors, that doesn’t mean he’s finished with non-Hollywood jobs, including his latest endeavor: bringing his very own Eastwood Whiskey to market, distilled from water found on his father’s land in Carmel. Of course he enjoys the product the way an Eastwood man should. “The only way to drink it,” he says, “is neat.”
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