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Clint Eastwood's son Scott Eastwood shared insight into his “brutal” grief journey after girlfriend Jewel Brangman died in a 2014 car crash when he was on set.
Scott Eastwood Shares Update on Father Clint Eastwood Six Months After Death of His Girlfriend
Scott Eastwood is reflecting on his late girlfriend's tragic passing.
The Longest Ride actor shared rare comments about his grief journey following the 2014 death of his girlfriend Jewel Brangman due to a defective airbag that went off when she was in a car accident, detailing the impact the experience had on his life.
"We were together for three or four years," Eastwood said on the Aug. 3 episode of the Armchair Expert podcast. "They had a recall on the airbag and what would've been a fender bender that probably most people would've survived...she was essentially shot by the airbag."
And because the 40-year-old was on the set of a movie when the tragedy struck, he wasn’t able to rush home.
"I was on another film set at the time," Eastwood remembered, "and being on a film set when someone passes or something happens, it's really tough."
"This had happened before, I had lost Paul Walker on Fury," he continued, referring to the Fast & Furious actor dying in a 2013 car crash while Eastwood filmed the 2014 action flick, "and he was one of my close friends. When you're on a film set, you don't have time to grieve because the show must go on."
Eastwood—the son of Clint Eastwood and Jacelyn Reeves—admitted that in such situations "you can't fly home," leaving you "stuck" because "you've gotta work," which in this case forced him to put off processing his girlfriend's death.
"I got the call actually during a filming day and I think I did a classic defense mechanism of, 'Just punt that to later. Compartmentalize that 'til later,'" he explained. "[It was] brutal having to deal with that and then not being able to go through that."
Aitor Rosas Sune/WWD via Getty Images
"I grieved later," Eastwood added. "And that's not a great thing because I think you do want to grieve with the people that are around that you didn't know that were a part of their lives, as well. I think that's an important part of the grieving process."
The actor had previously shared the story of Brangman's death just a couple of years after her death.
"I dated a girl a couple of years ago who died in a car accident," he told GQ Australia in 2016. "there was a recall on airbags. Her airbag exploded. It shot a projectile through her body. It split her spine, and um ... I’ve never told anybody that. I’ve lost friends before; I’ve lost some great friends. But, I had never lost someone I had been really intimate with, you know, like in that way, in a relationship."
At the time, Eastwood also pondered how the heartbreaking loss impacted his ability to date moving forward.
"I think that really affected me in a way that ... I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s made it harder for me to date."
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