(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, file)
Actor
Clint Eastwood has spoken out about his remarks at last week’s Republican National Convention, when he derided an invisible President Barack Obama in an empty chair.
And it turns out, he came up with the chair bit pretty much right before coming out on stage.
Maybe 15 or 20 minutes before Eastwood was scheduled to come out, the inspiration for his delivery hit him.
Backstage, “there was a stool there, and some fella kept asking me if I wanted to sit down,” Eastwood told his
hometown paper,
The Carmel (Calif.) Pine Cone.
“When I saw the stool sitting there, it gave me the idea. I’ll just put the stool out there and I’ll talk to Mr. Obama and ask him why he didn’t keep all of the promises he made to everybody.”
Eastwood said he was aware his segment got a little muddled at points, but told the paper that’s what happens without a written speech.
Eastwood, a former mayor of Carmel, said he refused to be vetted by the Romney camp because he didn’t know what he was going to say beforehand.
At the convention, no sooner had Eastwood started talking to that now-famous empty chair did Twitter light up with critics.
The Academy Award winning-actor/director said he knew his presentation was “very unorthodox,” but that was his intention from the beginning regardless of whether everyone was on board, the paper said.
Eastwood told the paper that after his remarks, it was all congratulations and glad-handing backstage.
In response to Eastwood’s presentation, Obama’s campaign responded that night with a picture of the president sitting in a chair saying, “This seat’s taken.”
