Famed actor and director Clint Eastwood said he hasn't been surprised by the reaction to his speech at the Republican convention.
"I'm not surprised at anything. And, you know, the one thing about getting into the senior status of life, like I am, you don't really care. You just say what you say and you get away with it," Eastwood said on CNBC in an interview that aired Friday.
Eastwood garnered headlines with his convention speech, where he used a chair as a prop and scolder an invisible President Obama for his stewardship of the country.
"I just decided to go a little different route because I figured, they've already heard that from about ten other people in front of me. So I just try something a little — new. And it was probably — seemed odd at the time. But, you know, I'm an odd person," he said.
Eastwood told CNBC that the reaction he received afterward was mixed.
"Well the party lines, either loved it or hated it. So — but then after a while everybody — even the people that hated it said, 'Well, what the heck. It seemed like it was kind of fun thing to do,' " he added.
In his first interview after the chair routine, Eastwood told The Carmel Pine Cone in Carmel, Calif., where he used to serve as mayor, that he came up with the "empty chair" routine just minutes before going on stage.
A year ago, Eastwood also garnered headlines for a Super Bowl ad for Chrysler in which he proclaimed, "it's halftime America, and our second half is about to begin." Some saw the commercial as being a pro-Obama advertisement, which prompted Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne to tell a Detroit radio station last year that the ad had "zero political content."
Eastwood said the ad was just intended to encourage people that there was momentum in the auto industry.
"Maybe it was just a bouquet for working people and trying to be encouraging where if there's a momentum going which — everybody thought there might be at that particular time — at least in the auto industry then let's keep it going. So that's all it was intended to do. And the commercial did," he said.
