Two 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 purportedly 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 Monday evening 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.
The paper, however, argues that Eastwood did say this, just not any time recently. In a Tuesday afternoon statement to The A.V. Club, Elisabeth Sereda, the writer of the Kurier article, claimed that she was asked by the outlet to write a “Best Of” quote compilation for Eastwood’s 95th birthday and that the quotes came from one of 14 different HFPA interviews Sereda covered. Sereda said that as a member of HFPA, she was allowed to use any of Eastwood’s quotes, and that “never said that is was a new or exclusive interview.” Sereda also suggested that confusion stemmed from translating the article into English. However, in a statement to The Guardian, Kurier editor Martin Gebhart said it was wrong to present the old quotes in this context and publicly cut ties with Sereda, writing, “Even though no quotes were fabricated, the interviews are documented, and the accusation of fabrication can be refuted, we will no longer work with the author in the future because transparency and our strict editorial standards are paramount to us.”
