Clint Eastwood Almost Shared The Screen With Jane Fonda

Movie stars are still very much a factor in Hollywood, but they seem a little less special in our social media age. Even those that don’t have active accounts on Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, and the like seem a little more human now that anyone can whip out their smartphone and record, say, Timothée Chalamet popping into a coffee shop for an espresso. We just don’t get awestruck by stars the way we used to.

Those of us born before the proliferation of the internet remember a time when stars felt larger than life. Warren Beatty, Barbra Streisand, and Burt Reynolds were like American royalty. When you went to the movies and saw them in a trailer for a new motion picture, you knew you’d be right back in that theater (or one close by) to see that sucker in a few months. And if you were promised two big stars for the price of one, good lord! Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep? Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor? Ted Danson and Howie Mandel?

Mega-star pairings were still a huge deal in 1984 when Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood hooked up for the cop comedy “City Heat.” It was lousy, but, in the moment, it was hard to turn down (unless the studio stupidly opened it the same weekend as “Beverly Hills Cop,” starring newly minted mega-star Eddie Murphy). For Eastwood, it could’ve been the second of two such buzzy team-ups that year. Unfortunately, he didn’t think very highly of Jane Fonda.

I interviewed writer-director Richard Tuggle this week to discuss his terrific 1984 thriller “Tightrope,” and he revealed to me during our chat that he floated the notion of casting Jane Fonda in the rape prevention counselor role that eventually went to the great Geneviève Bujold. Why didn’t this come to pass? I’ll hand it over to Tuggle:

“We started shooting down in New Orleans [in 1983], and I was meeting the crew on the first day of shooting. It was kind of a difficult situation. We came up with Geneviève Bujold, who I thought was great in the movie. I kind of pushed Jane Fonda because I thought it would be sort of interesting, her being sort of left wing and Clint maybe right wing, and sort of that kind of thing in the movie. But he didn’t like her, so that canceled that idea.”

Tuggle continued, “He might’ve known her and not liked her politics. He just said, ‘No, I don’t like her.'”

An outspoken political activist, Fonda has certainly ruffled her share of feathers over the years (she recently praised the should-be-uncontroversial work of intimacy coordinators on film sets). And Eastwood, who was once elected mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California and also spoke at the 2012 Republican National Convention, is no shrinking violet when it comes to his politics either. Maybe it would’ve been a poor fit. Maybe they would’ve burned up the tabloids with tales of on-set tiffs. Maybe that would’ve turned a modest late summer hit into a must-see blockbuster.

I think Bujold is absolutely perfect in “Tightrope,” but consider this another alternate universe I’d like to visit once such portals are available.