“It would be great if I could!” How this legendary actor convinced Clint Eastwood to play his legendary character in Merciless

“Good friend, I don’t want to offend you again, but I believe that this country should elect a king, or even a queen, instead of a president. You don’t hurry the king or the queen. Royalty majesty, you see, we’ve shot some pheasants, and say, for a pheasant, my word, whoever you want.

If you’ve seen the masterpiece Merciless, you definitely have this exchange in mind, featuring the character of English Bobby, the “Duke of Death”, brilliantly played by the fabulous Richard Harris, just before he’s brutally beaten by Gene Hackman, aka The Sadist. Little Bill Daggett.

“Tell him Clint Eastwood is calling you!”

Brilliant idea from Eastwood to entrust the role of English Bob to the late Harris. in an old video Inside Actors StudioEastwood also told a delicious anecdote about this topic. “I wanted Richard Harris to play this character in the movie, he was living in the Bahamas at the time, I called and a woman answered and said wait she was going to hire him.

“Tell him Clint Eastwood is calling you!” He went back on the line to say “Who?” Then he came over and said, “Hi, it’s Bob!” Ironically, he was downstairs in the living room watching A man of the high plains ! He was excited about my suggestion because he loved westerns.

Richard Harris made him a really great character. An arrogant and despicable murderer, supposedly English, but not quite English. In a promotional interview during the film’s releaseHarris explained that he understood the character of English Bob, “Because he understood that kind of English, because they lived on the back of my nation, five or six hundred years.” An allusion to the occupation of Ireland, where Harris was originally from, by Great Britain. Colonization and occupation that left a bloody mark in history…

“It would be nice if I could do that”

Harris believed that a man like English Bob would not be a true English aristocrat, but an aspirant with pretensions of blue blood. Since the character had to be humiliated according to the script, he suggested adding an extra layer.

“When I read the script, I said to Clint, ‘You know, it would be great if I could do that, it would be great if I could play this man as an upper class guy.’ When he gets beat up by Hackman, all that deception goes away and you really see that behind it all he’s really a very low-level guy, so Clint’s like, “Yeah, well, go for it.” I was a little afraid to go in that direction sometimes on the set, but he kept encouraging me to go.”