Antihero in the context of "Suicide Squad"

Clinton Eastwood Jr. (born May 31, 1930) is an American actor and film director. After achieving success in the Western TV series Rawhide, Eastwood rose to international fame with his role as the "Man with No Name" in Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy of spaghetti Westerns during the mid-1960s and as antihero cop Harry Callahan in the five Dirty Harry films throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These roles, among others, have made Eastwood an enduring cultural icon of masculinity. Elected in 1986, Eastwood served for two years as the mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.

Eastwood's greatest commercial successes are the adventure comedy Every Which Way but Loose (1978) and its action comedy sequel Any Which Way You Can (1980). Other popular Eastwood films include the Westerns Hang 'Em High (1968), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and Pale Rider (1985), the action-war film Where Eagles Dare (1968), the prison film Escape from Alcatraz (1979), the war film Heartbreak Ridge (1986), the action film In the Line of Fire (1993), and the romantic drama The Bridges of Madison County (1995). More recent works include Gran Torino (2008), The Mule (2018), and Cry Macho (2021). Since 1967, Eastwood's company Malpaso Productions has produced all but four of his American films.

The action film is a film genre that predominantly features chase sequences, fights, shootouts, explosions, and stunt work. The specifics of what constitutes an action film has been in scholarly debate since the 1980s. While some scholars such as David Bordwell suggested they were films that favor spectacle to storytelling, others such as Geoff King stated they allow the scenes of spectacle to be attuned to storytelling. Action films are often hybrid with other genres, mixing into various forms such as comedies, science fiction films, and horror films.

While the term "action film" or "action adventure film" has been used as early as the 1910s, the contemporary definition usually refers to a film that came with the arrival of New Hollywood and the rise of anti-heroes appearing in American films of the late 1960s and 1970s drawing from war films, crime films and Westerns. These genres were followed by what is referred to as the "classical period" in the 1980s. This was followed by the post-classical era where American action films were influenced by Hong Kong action cinema and the growing using of computer generated imagery in film. Following the September 11 attacks, a return to the early forms of the genre appeared in the wake of Kill Bill and The Expendables films.

The Man with No Name (Italian: Uomo senza nome) is the antihero character portrayed by Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy of Italian Spaghetti Western films: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). He is recognizable by his sarape, brown hat, tan cowboy boots, fondness for cigarillos, and the fact that he rarely speaks.

The "Man with No Name" concept was invented by the American distributor United Artists. Eastwood's character does have a name, or nickname, which is different in each film: "Joe", "Manco" and "Blondie", respectively.

Inspector Harold Francis "Dirty Harry" Callahan (born October 3, 1930) is a fictional character and the protagonist of the Dirty Harry film series, which consists of Dirty Harry (1971), Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983), and The Dead Pool (1988). Callahan is portrayed by Clint Eastwood in each film.

From his debut, Callahan became the template for a new kind of film cop: an antihero who does not hesitate to cross professional boundaries in pursuit of his own vision of justice, especially when the law is poorly served by an inept, incompetent bureaucracy.

Hardboiled (or hard-boiled) fiction is a literary genre that shares some of its characters and settings with crime fiction (especially detective fiction and noir fiction). The genre's typical protagonist is a detective who battles the violence of organized crime that flourished during Prohibition in the United States (1920–1933) and its aftermath, while dealing with a legal system that has become as corrupt as the organized crime itself. Rendered cynical by this cycle of violence, the detectives of hardboiled fiction are often antiheroes. Notable hardboiled detectives include Dick Tracy, Philip Marlowe, Nick Charles, Mike Hammer, Sam Spade, Lew Archer, Slam Bradley, and The Continental Op.

Jean Henri Gaston Giraud (French: [ʒiʁo]; 8 May 1938 – 10 March 2012) was a French artist, cartoonist, and writer who worked in the Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées (BD) tradition. Giraud garnered worldwide acclaim predominantly under the pseudonym Mœbius (/ˈmoʊbiəs/; French: [møbjys]) for his fantasy/science-fiction work, and to a slightly lesser extent as Gir (French: [ʒiʁ]), which he used for his Western-themed work. Esteemed by Federico Fellini, Stan Lee, and Hayao Miyazaki, among others, he has been described as the most influential bande dessinée artist after Hergé.

His most famous body of work as Gir concerns the Blueberry series, created with writer Jean-Michel Charlier, featuring one of the first antiheroes in Western comics. As Mœbius, he achieved worldwide renown with science-fiction and fantasy comics drawn in a highly imaginative, surreal, almost abstract style. These works include Arzach and the Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius. He also collaborated with avant garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky for an unproduced adaptation of Dune and the comic-book series The Incal.

A Hero of Our Time (Russian: Герой нашего времени, romanized: Gerój nášego vrémeni, IPA: [ɡʲɪˈroj ˈnaʂɨvə ˈvrʲemʲɪnʲɪ]) is a novel by Mikhail Lermontov, written in 1839, published in 1840, and revised in 1841.

It is an example of the superfluous man novel, noted for its compelling Byronic hero (or antihero) Pechorin and for the beautiful descriptions of the Caucasus. This is the first psychological fiction in the history of Russian literature. There are several English translations, including one by Vladimir Nabokov and Dmitri Nabokov in 1958.

Heathcliff is a fictional character in Emily Brontë's 1847 novel Wuthering Heights. Owing to the novel's enduring fame and popularity, he is often regarded as an archetype of the tortured antihero whose all-consuming rage, jealousy and anger destroy both him and those around him; in short, the Byronic hero.

He is better known for being a romantic hero due to his youthful love for Catherine Earnshaw, than for his final years of vengeance in the second half of the novel, during which he grows into a bitter, haunted man, and for a number of incidents in his early life that suggest that he was an upset and sometimes malicious individual from the beginning. His complicated, mesmerizing, absorbing, and altogether bizarre nature makes him a rare character, incorporating elements of both the hero and villain. Actors who have portrayed Heathcliff on screen include Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Timothy Dalton, Ralph Fiennes, Tom Hardy, and Jacob Elordi.