This article is more than 6 months old

This article is more than 6 months old

Clint Eastwood has backed Mike Bloomberg for president, breaking with the Republican party he has supported for decades and even served in elected office.

“The best thing we could do is just get Mike Bloomberg in there,” the 89-year-old actor and director told the Wall Street Journal of the billionaire former New York mayor, whose run for the Democratic nomination to face Donald Trump has generated poll surges and weapons-grade controversy over his past policies and comments.

Eastwood also said he approved of “certain things that Trump’s done” but wanted the president to act “in a more genteel way, without tweeting and calling people names”.

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“I would personally like for him to not bring himself to that level,” he said, adding that national politics “has gotten so ornery”.

Eastwood has said he is a registered Libertarian and has backed Democrats but most of his own experience lies in Republican party politics. From 1986 to 1988, he was mayor of Carmel, California.

“I was a Republican, but people never thought about their parties except at the national level,” he said. “I drank a lot of tea and chatted with people. I told people, ‘I’ll fix this, and I’ll fix that.’”

Nowadays, he said, California has too much regulation, making it “a place other than a democracy”.

Eastwood did not seek re-election as mayor, choosing not to continue his political career because, he told the Journal: “You can’t have the same old people in office all the time.”

The paper did not ask the actor, who was born in 1930 and came to prominence in the TV series Rawhide in 1959, if at 78 Bloomberg might be too old to take on Trump, 73, in a fight for the White House.

Nor did the interview touch on Eastwood’s infamous appearance at the 2012 Republican national convention, when his bizarre conversation with an empty chair, conducted in support of the presidential nominee Mitt Romney, went viral.

Instead Eastwood reminisced about playing golf with Trump – whom he has never officially endorsed – and Steve Wynn, a casino billionaire and the former Republican National Committee finance chair now, like the president, the subject of extensive accusations of sexual misconduct.

Discussing his many films, Eastwood agreed that Gran Torino, a hit from 2009 about a Korean war veteran who learns to get along with his immigrant neighbours, was made at a time when people were “putting down masculinity” and “has a certain relevance in Mr Trump’s America”.

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“It’s about a guy who’s a racist,” he said, “a hard-ass. He didn’t like minorities much, of any kind. But he learns to appreciate people that he really hated.”

Eastwood also acknowledged recent moves for better treatment of women in the entertainment world – saying “the #MeToo generation has its points” – and discussed related controversy over his most recent film.

The movie Richard Jewell, the Journal said, “got sucked into a #MeToo-like controversy over its portrayal of Kathy Scruggs, a reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution”.

The Atlanta newspaper said the portrayal of its reporter sleeping with a source for information on the 1996 Olympic Park bombing was “entirely false and malicious, and … extremely defamatory and damaging”.

Eastwood told the Journal he wished his studio, Warner Bros, had told the paper “to go screw themselves”.