“I don’t look like I did it at 20, so what?” “

At 91, Clint Eastwood shows no signs of slowing down, either as an actor or a director.

With his latest film, crying macho – in which he does double duty as a leading man and filmmaker – previewing this week, the Hollywood icon reflects on his heritage and age, in a new interview with the Los Angeles Times.

“I don’t look like I did at 20, so what?” Eastwood says of life as a nonagenarian. “It just means there are more interesting guys you can play.”

This includes Mike Milo, a former rodeo star and horse breeder who is the main character of crying macho. Eastwood says the 1970s western is a movie that has been on his radar since 1988, when he was in his late 50s.

“I’m too young for that,” he thought at the time. “Let me run and we’ll have Robert Mitchum, an older dude.”

But the film has only come to life now, with Eastwood taking on the role he once considered himself too young to play.

“I always thought I would go back and watch this. It was something I had to grow up in, ”he says. “One day, I just felt it was time to see him again. It’s fun when something is your age, when you don’t have to work to be older.

Indeed, don’t try too hard to act – “I never thought of playing the role of an intellectual sport. You don’t want to think too much about something,” he says – suits him very well. As for directing, a job he initially took on because “the gist of directing was something you can do as an older guy,” the Oscar-winning actor says he’s continuing because “I like this”. But he admits his age made him think.

“Why am I still working in my 90s?” Eastwood, who remembers putting bags of groceries for 37 cents an hour in his youth, notes. “Are people going to start throwing tomatoes at you? I got to the point where I was wondering if it was enough, but not to the point where I decided it was. take out a few turkeys, they’ll tell you soon enough.

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Elsewhere in the interview, the unforgiven star talks about fears he might fall off the set (he didn’t) and how crying macho will air on HBO Max and hit theaters simultaneously. Like many directors, he has a bone to choose the latter situation.

“[It’s] it’s not my favorite thing in the world, “he said.” how’s it gonna work? I still do not know.

The modern experience of watching movies may have changed – especially over the past year and a half – but Eastwood maintains that it hasn’t.

“I never think about it,” Eastwood said. “If I’m not the same guy, I don’t want to know anything about it. I might not like the new one. I might think, ‘What am I doing with this idiot?’ “