56 years ago, after a western with Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood was supposed to play this famous Batman villain, but luckily it never happened.

1968 year. Clint Eastwood found great success playing the untitled male role in Sergio Leone’s westerns. He has just returned from Italy, where he filmed a segment of The Witches (1967), and is returning to Hollywood. Several projects have already been shot: the western Hang Them High with Ted Post and Sheriff in New York with Don Siegel, and then the war film When Eagles Strike with Brian G. Hutton.

And while Eastwood was shooting his war film in the first half of 1968, the Batman series, created by Lorenzo Semple Jr. (Papillon, Flash Gordon) and William Dozier, was finishing its second season. Adam West (Batman) and Burt Ward (Robin) take the kids and present the world of The Dark Knight in a cartoonish way, turning its supervillains into caricatures and their performers into histrionics.

At that time, the creators of the series were thinking about the upcoming third season. The idea is to introduce new villains, and one of the Dark Knight’s most famous adversaries has yet to appear in the series: Two-Face. Bruce Wayne’s prosecutor and friend, he is disfigured and from that moment he decides to carry out his own justice.

At the time, Clint Eastwood was the production favorite to play the supervillain. It should be remembered that the Batman series is a favorite place for movie stars who want to come and have fun guest starring (and generally doing something). Seymour Cassell, Marie Windsor, Za Za Gabor, George Sanders, Michael Pate, Anne Baxter, Victor Bunno and Vincent Price have already arrived, while Eli Wallach, his co-star from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, has just played Mr. Freeze. Two episodes.

Ultimately, Eastwood was not offered the role due to ABC canceling the series after two years on the air. In any case, it was difficult to imagine him in this firmly comic role, a genre he would only touch on rare occasions in his career, and much later, in the late 1970s, he would take the place of Batman’s nemesis in another atypical project, the musical comedy The Fair of the West. The one to shoot that will cause him a lot of trouble.

After nearly playing two roles, in 1997, Eastwood, at age 67, plans to direct a Batman adventure inspired by the comics. The Dark Knight ReturnsRetired Bruce Wayne dons his mask again on the last lap. The project never saw the light of day, and Bruce Wayne didn’t return to the screen until 2005 with Batman Begins.