Gran Torino in the context of "List of Gran Torino characters"

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 Mule is a 2018 American crime drama film starring and directed by Clint Eastwood, and produced by Eastwood, Dan Friedkin, Jessica Meier, Tim Moore, Kristina Rivera, and Bradley Thomas. The screenplay, written by Nick Schenk, is based on the 2014 The New York Times article "The Sinaloa Cartel's 90-Year-Old Drug Mule" by Sam Dolnick, which recounts the story of Leo Sharp, a World War II veteran in his 80s who became a drug courier for the Sinaloa Cartel.

The film co-stars Bradley Cooper, Laurence Fishburne, Michael Peña, Dianne Wiest, and Andy García. This was Eastwood's first acting project since 2012, and his first starring leading role in a film directed by himself since 2008. Filming began in early June 2018, taking place in Atlanta and Augusta, Georgia, with other film locations in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Michael Stevens is an American musician and composer. He has collaborated with Kyle Eastwood on numerous projects, including the film scores to Clint Eastwood's films, Mystic River (2003), Million Dollar Baby (2004), Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), Gran Torino (2008), and Invictus (2009). He was nominated with Kyle Eastwood for a 2006 Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Original Score for Letters from Iwo Jima. In 2008, he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song for the song "Gran Torino".

Nick Schenk (born November 12, 1965) is an American screenwriter known for writing the Clint Eastwood-directed feature film Gran Torino in 2008 for which he won Best Original Screenplay from the National Board of Review. He continued his collaborations with Eastwood on The Mule (2018) and Cry Macho (2021).

Trouble with the Curve is a 2012 American sports drama film directed by Robert Lorenz and starring Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams, Justin Timberlake, Matthew Lillard, and John Goodman. The film revolves around an aging baseball scout whose daughter joins him on a scouting trip. Filming began in March 2012, and the film was released on September 21, 2012.

This was Eastwood's first acting project since 2008's Gran Torino and his first acting role in a film he did not direct since his cameo in 1995's Casper. A year after its release, the film became the subject of a plagiarism lawsuit by a producer alleging that his former partner had taken an unfinished script after a dispute and conspired with his agent and Warner Bros. to present it as the work of a relative unknown.