Hollywood great Clint Eastwood appears to have given his backing to billionaire former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg for president.
Mr Bloomberg’s White House bid has proven controversial after he used his vast personal wealth to orchestrate an advertisement blitz, boosting his ratings with voters.
During an aggressive televised debate in Las Vegas on Wednesday, the 78-year-old’s rivals for the Democratic nomination attacked his record on race and gender.
However, it appears he has done enough to impress Eastwood, himself a former mayor, who told the Wall Street Journal: “The best thing we could do is just get Mike Bloomberg in there.”
Eastwood, 89, is a self-confessed libertarian and former mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, a small town in California.
In his interview with the WSJ, the Dirty Harry star bemoaned the state of political discourse and said that while he agrees with “certain things” Donald Trump has done during his presidency, he wished he had acted in a “more genteel way, without tweeting and calling people names. I would personally like for him to not bring himself to that level”.
Eastwood is famously one of the few high-profile figures in Hollywood to publicly hold conservative views and was a critic of Barack Obama.
Eastwood’s latest film is drama Richard Jewell, which is based on the true story of a security guard wrongly accused of planting a bomb during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.