No bull! Scott Eastwood says his bull-riding experience came after shooting 'Longest Ride'

NEW YORK, April 5 (UPI) -- Scott Eastwood may play a professional bull-rider in The Longest Ride, but the actor reveals he didn't get to try his hand at the sport until after the big-screen romance wrapped.

Asked how much research he did to play a modern-day bull-rider, the 29-year-old son of Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood told reporters in New York recently: "I take every role pretty seriously and I was a big fan of the sport prior to the film, so I knew a bunch about it.

"I knew sort of the stars and the space and I had gone to rodeos as a kid. I had been to the Salinas Rodeo, but I took it pretty seriously. I was hanging with the guys and watching them buck bulls and drinking beers with them," he explained, adding insurance reasons kept him from actually riding a bull during the movie's shoot.

"I went behind Twentieth Century Fox's back. They weren't too happy about it, but I went and bucked a bull after the fact. I did it after the fact. I just didn't want to go around and talk about like I knew what bull-riding was about without really bucking a bull," he said, confiding he held on for about 2 ½ seconds before he fell off.

Based on Nicholas Sparks' bestselling novel and co-starring Britt Robertson, Alan Alda, Jack Huston and Oona Chaplin, The Longest Ride is to open in U.S. theaters Friday.