Last week, photos of Clint Eastwood’s 27-year-old hunky son gallivanting on a boat — shirtless and scruffy — went viral. Town & Country had photographed the “Dirty Harry” heir for its October issue (inset below), and within days of posting the all-American shoot online, the magazine says the story racked up more than five million hits on its Web site.
Every single gossip, fashion and media outlet was abuzz. Who is Scott Eastwood, and why haven’t we ever heard of this chiseled creature before?
Well, because Scott sort of wanted it that way.
“I like being under the radar. I didn’t get into this business to become famous,” the budding actor tells The Post from London, where he arrived on Friday to start filming the World War II thriller “Fury,” alongside Brad Pitt and Shia LaBeouf.
“I got into this business because I like acting and I want to make movies. I would be happy living the rest of my life never famous,” he says.
While his children-of-privilege peers were out dropping names and picking up DUIs, Scott was living a limelight-free existence as “Scott Reeves.”
He spent his childhood shuttling between Hawaii (where his mother, Jacelyn Reeves, a former flight attendant, lives) and his father’s estate in Carmel, Calif., where he passed the time “riding horses, shooting guns and fishing.”
“I always tell people I had a very tough life,” jokes Scott, who’s currently single. His parents had an affair in the ’80s while Clint Eastwood was still living with his then-girlfriend, actress Sondra Locke. The two met at the Hog’s Breath Inn, a Carmel restaurant/bar owned by the movie star. They had two children together, Scott and his younger sister, Kathryn, 25. (Eastwood has seven children with five women.)
Scott says reports that he wasn’t publicly acknowledged as Eastwood’s son until 2002 are rubbish.
“My dad’s been my dad for as long as I can remember,” he says.
It’s because of Eastwood that Scott — who stands at 6 feet and whose eyes are as blue as his teeth are white — caught the acting bug.
“I grew up on movie sets and traveling the world with my pops,” says Scott, who bounced around city colleges before graduating from Loyola Marymount in 2008 as a communications major.
Scott’s first role was a cameo in his dad’s 2006 WWII film “Flags of Our Fathers.” He’s also appeared in other Eastwood flicks including “Gran Torino,” “Invictus” and “Trouble With the Curve.” (Scott’s manager says he had to audition for each project.) Scott stars as a surfer-turned-Marine in the upcoming murder drama “Dawn Patrol,” with another surfer lead in “The Perfect Wave,” due out next spring.
“I want to be a man’s man — not a kid actor or a glitzy pop star but a no-bulls–t leading man,” Scott told Town & Country.
And that means no shortcuts, he says on the phone from London.
“My dad always says, ‘Just stick around.’ Everybody thinks it’s an overnight success. But the reality is, it takes years of hard work.”
Scott used his mother’s surname at first: “I wanted to make it on my own and to at least see if I could do it by myself,” he says.
“Everyone wants to pitch Eastwood; that’s the cheapest game in the book. Can you make it on your own? Can you stand on your own two feet? If you’re not good, if you can’t carry your weight in the audition room . . . it doesn’t matter what your last name is,” he says.
Scott slapped on the famed family name about five years ago, at his dad’s behest, he says.
“It was one of those things, it was always going to happen,” says Scott. (One thing that isn’t going to happen? A political career à la Daddy: “I want to stay away [from politics] . . . once people enter that realm, they start getting scrutinized about everything. I’m a pretty private person,” says Scott.)
Just because he’s an Eastwood on paper now doesn’t mean he’s turned into a demanding celebrity. Scott continues to keep a low-key profile surfing, doing carpentry and drinking (he favors whiskey, neat) in San Diego, where he lives in a “Craftsman little beach house” he’s fixed up on his own.
“I like working with my hands. It feels good to build something yourself. So many people these days don’t know how to change a light bulb . . . as a man, you need to know how to do those types of things,” says Scott.
When he’s not Instagramming pics of himself doing manly tasks like shoveling and catching fish (shirtless, naturally — he did model for Abercrombie & Fitch, after all), Scott’s planning surfing trips with friends (next up is Cuba in December), working on his own Eastwood Whiskey brand and visiting the local watering hole, Saddle Bar, where he’s an investor.
On Saddle Bar’s opening night a year and a half ago, the place was so mobbed that Scott jumped behind the bar to clean glasses, says coowner Matt Weaver, who adds that the up-and-coming actor can usually be found “on the dance floor, dancing his ass off.”
Scott’s signature move?
“Shirt-off dancing,” says Weaver. (Scott’s résumé includes “swing dancing” in his “special skills” section, along with body-boarding, free-diving, boxing, saxophone and weapons training.)
“He’s so not Hollywood,” says Noe DeWitt, who photographed Scott for the T&C spread. “He’s a real dude, you know?
“He had gotten [to set] before all of us, which never happens. He was asleep on the boat. He didn’t have [an entourage]. He was straight off the red-eye, already in his bathing suit, ready to go,” says DeWitt, who adds that when the shoot, in Newport, RI, was almost canceled due to budget constraints, Scott saved the day.
“He opted to fly economy in order to make the shoot happen,” says DeWitt. “You don’t see that very often.”
Scott’s aware that he’s an anomaly in Hollywood.
“This industry is known for not having a lot of humility, and people have forgotten that it’s quite the opportunity of a lifetime . . . I’m just lucky to be working, and I’ll take every opportunity to express that.”
No doubt, he’s remained humble in light of becoming a bona fide, overnight sex symbol.
When asked how it feels, the actor clams up: “I really don’t even know how to answer that, to be honest,” he says. “I’m single . . . if girls like me, hey, that’s great. I think that’s awesome.”