The Clint Eastwood movie disowned by its star: “I was just really repulsed”
By and large, Clint Eastwood has never been an actor or filmmaker who’s courted too much controversy during a career that’s spanned more than 70 years and elevated him to iconic status as arguably the industry’s greatest-ever double threat.
After all, he’s a legend in front of the camera with a filmography stacked high with unforgettable characters, searing performances, and classic movies, while his efforts behind it have yielded 40 features and four Academy Awards and cemented him as an all-timer on both fronts.
His work hasn’t made headlines for the wrong reasons too often, but there are exceptions. Dirty Harry is probably the most famous case, with Don Siegel’s crime thriller accused of promoting certain ideologies that Eastwood strenuously denied, while Richard Jewell came under fire for how certain incidents were depicted.
The most complex case by far was Gran Torino, though, with star Bee Vang speaking out on several occasions. The 2008 drama was a sizeable box office hit, following Eastwood’s bitter, cynical, xenophobic, and racist war veteran as he gradually develops a bond with Vang’s Thao Vang Lor and the Hmong community he shares a neighbourhood with.
Per the Hmong Studies Journal, Vang’s hesitance was there from his first audition. “I heard about the story and the ‘sides’ – the excerpts from the script that were used for auditions – and I was just really repulsed by what I read. I tried to make sense of the characters and their lines. But there were things I couldn’t figure out about the relations between Walt and the Hmong characters.”
One particular issue was the insults Kowalksi used. “For instance, at some point, Thao tells Walt, ‘Go ahead. I don’t care if you insult me or say racist things because, you know what? I’ll take it’. I didn’t understand why a character like Thao would say that. Why wouldn’t he object to being insulted? What does ‘taking it’ even mean? What was intended by the screenwriter, or was this just careless writing?”
More than a decade after Gran Torino‘s release, Vang spoke out again when the early stages of the pandemic coincided with a rise in violence towards Asians and Asian-Americans, with the actor pointing to his personal recollections of how audience greeted the film as endemic of a problem that had never gone away but had only become exacerbated with the passage of time.
Vang explained that “more concerning was the way the film mainstreamed anti-Asian racism, even as it increased Asian-American representation,” with the actor especially troubled by how audience members would treat the use of certain words as humourous moments: “To this day, I am still haunted by the mirth of white audiences, the uproarious laughter when Eastwood’s curmudgeonly racist character, Walt Kowalski, growled a slur.”
Vang had only recently turned 16 when Gran Torino arrived in cinemas, and it’s heartbreaking that so little had changed 12 years later. He had his concerns from the beginning, and they were founded on completely solid ground, leaving the actor to lament the lack of progress made.
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