An actor can make a living on doing just one thing. It’s not always a schtick; some actors have the talent to play a variety of roles, but may be cursed with a look that makes them unbelievable as anything other than short, fat, scarred, bald, or bug-eyed. More often than not, this type of thinking is representative only of the limitations of our own imaginations, and many of those typecast performers need only an opportunity to showcase their range.
Audiences had written off many of these actors as villains, until they were given a chance to grow in a role that exposed another side: a heroic, vulnerable, at times even lachrymose side. These are the best hero roles played by actors typecast as villains.
15 Peter Stormare – Armageddon
In 1996, Peter Stormare was so terrifying as the mute multiple murderer in Fargo that we can’t even remember his character’s name. For years, he cornered the market on nameless scary foreign bad guy roles.
Then he was Lev Andropov in Armageddon, the gruff know-it-all cosmonaut who helps save the day two or three times. If Ben Affleck can shove wedding cake in his face, then he’s cool. He even made us laugh as the nihilist pornstar Karl Hungus in The Big Lebowski. The man’s got range. And really big scissors.
14 Glenn Close – Mars Attacks!
Between Dangerous Liaisons, Fatal Attraction, and 101 Dalmatians, moviegoers were ready to hide their husbands, dalmatians, and pet bunny rabbits from Glenn Close. Then she joined the ridiculously star-studded ensemble of Mars Attacks! Her role as the first lady barely even matters; attendance was the only rule for this silly-by-association script.
13 Gary Busey – Rookie of the Year
In Lethal Weapon, Gary Busey‘s Mr. Joshua was the first villain to hold a lighter under his arm to prove his loyalty. After suffering a beating from Mel Gibson’s billy club, he went home and considered his future.
He returned with a mustache and some not-your-dad-but-kinda charm as Chet “Rocket” Steadman in Rookie of the Year, the pitcher whose shoulder pain plays a mean electric guitar. What happened to Gary Busey after that is anyone’s best guess.
12 Michael Rooker – Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Michael Rooker in a crew cut was convincing as a murdering Southern racist in Mississippi Burning. On the other hand, Michael Rooker in a metal mohawk gave us an unpolished look at the crossroads of paternal love and celestiophilia, all while showing what it really means to be a father. The Ravager funeral scene in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 keeps company with the most touching moments in all of Marveldom.
11 Christopher Walker – Pulp Fiction
A classic Bond Villain, Christopher Walken‘s voice used to inspire such terror that public telephones would refuse his quarters, terrified that he’d come back to collect the vig. It was his drive by cameo in Pulp Fiction that brought purpose, and even a little humor, to The Gold Watch’s sphinctal MacGuffin. He is, of course, an ally to the protagonist in this segment. Nevertheless, a death stare from Walken can still make a passerby clench tight enough to smuggle a grandfather clock up there.
10 Michael Wincott – Nope
A sandpaper-rough voice and sharp brow gave Michael Wincott his choice of roles as the charming villain. He was chillingly terrifying as the casually sociopathic hostage taker in the largely forgotten Eddie Murphy vehicle Metro.
It was almost difficult to recognize him as the all-business cinematographer Antlers Holst in Nope; and at the same time, satisfying. His natural verisimilitude as a pro filmmaker chasing his white whale gave the entire project the feel of real Hollywood, and helped bring some experience to a film starring relative up-and-comers Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer. The role is integral to the plot, but one imagines Wincott clocking off the set of Nope and nonchalantly killing it in three more roles without hesitation.
9 Michael Shannon – Nocturnal Animals
Michael Shannon‘s performances are so multidimensional, even his heroes feel as though they have something to hide. Such was the case in his Oscar-nominated role as the doomed vigilante sheriff in Nocturnal Animals.
Director Tom Ford taps into the existential with a dual narrative about a lovelorn author and the characters in his barbarically tragic novel. Shannon’s role is a fiction within a fiction, allowing him to be simultaneously theatrical yet lifelike, drawing from the classic, hard-bitten, laconic cowboys played by Charles Bronson or Lee Van Cleef. It’s a perfect performance, impossibly both with- and against-type.
8 Jonathan Pryce – The Two Popes
Jonathan Pryce was a Brosnan-era Bond Villain, a standout modern example of classic cartoonish megalomania that’s dead-on brand. In The Two Popes, he took a career-first Oscar nominated turn as Pope Francis, discussing the state of the modern Catholic Church with Anthony Hopkins’ Pope Benedict.
His heroism comes when his previously wide-eyed character has to deal with the nagging doubt about his personal fitness for the job at hand, while negotiating the burdensome shame being passed on from his predecessor. It’s a tough role, hardly heroic at all, though he did have some help during the Spanish sections.
7 Ralph Fiennes – The English Patient
Evil incarnate as Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List, it would be a while before Ralph Fiennes didn’t send a shiver down our spine. Clothed in the stink of genocide, Ralph sought the disinfectant qualities of the desert, to the role of the roguish burn victim with a love story in The English Patient. After three hours of longing looks and doomed love, Ralph successfully turned the page on his former villainy. Lucky for him, it turns out that sex symbol trumps bad guy like paper covers rock.
6 Margo Martindale – Paris, je t’aime
Margo Martindale was the angry Southern lady in everything from the Movie of the Week to a Clint Eastwood drama. But it was her brief role in Alexander Payne’s segment of Paris, je t’aime that unleashed her singular vulnerability. Margo plays a lonely American tourist in Paris, a performance brimming with melancholy, romance, and honesty. It’s a hero’s acceptance of her own ennui, as she herself points out in her academic, but poorly accented, French:
“…A feeling came over me. It was like remembering something I’d never known before, or had always been waiting for, but I didn’t know what. Maybe it was something I’d forgotten, or something I’ve been missing all my life. All I can say is that I felt, at the same time, joy and sadness. But not too much sadness, because I felt alive. Yes, alive.”
Without this role, it’s unclear she would have ever had the opportunity to shine as badass Character Actress Margo Martindale; the exaggerated, homicidal version of herself from BoJack Horseman, one of the best existentialist roles in cartoon history.
5 Donald Sutherland – Ordinary People
Donald Sutherland played Pinkley, a military convict sentenced to 30 years hard labor, in The Dirty Dozen. His bug eyes and lanky frame made him a source of derision, even among his fellow convicts. It’s almost impossible to imagine the transformation, thirteen years later, into the devoted father concerned for his son Timothy Hutton’s mental health in Ordinary People.
It’s an understated, suburban role, rendered heartbreaking by the tough choices posed by the character’s goals. Although bereaved, he’s never the victim. Nor is he passive in trying to carve out a peaceful household for his bruised family. Mary Tyler Moore’s own Oscar-winning, against-type role is as Hutton’s icy, detached mother is a difficult dance to follow, but he finds the lead with agonizing candor, ultimately paying the price for doing what he feels is right.
4 Helena Bonham Carter – Big Fish
It’s the non-witch witch from Big Fish that’s a noteworthy turn for Helena Bonham Carter. While having performed good and evil parts with a natural meticulousness, Tim Burton uses her steely reputation to play two parts in his surprisingly emotional father/son story. A throwaway role at the beginning of the film has Bonham Carter as a common, Hans Christian Andersen-style witch with a prophetical eye, giving the brave teenage protagonist, Edward, a chance to see his own death.
Edward becomes Ewan McGregor, and she returns as Jenny, the allegorical citizen of a failed Southern small town. Edward repairs the town and Jenny’s house, but in so doing, is forced to spurn a romantic relationship with Jenny, favoring faithfulness to his wife and true love. When Edward’s grown son, Billy Crudup, investigates his father’s past, an aged-out-of-the-storybook Jenny reveals she was never a witch at all, simply an unlucky woman who fell in love with a man she could never have. Her fate is tragic, but it’s her acceptance makes her heroic.
3 Gary Oldman – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Gary Oldman spent a career perfecting just what kind of evil was needed for a role. He’s tongue-in-cheek evil in The Fifth Element, melodramatic evil in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, commercially viable evil in Air Force One, hammy evil in True Romance, and just plain evil in Léon: The Professional. Also, vengeful evil in Hannibal, red herring evil in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, historical evil in JFK, deadbeat evil in The Scarlet Letter, and he even played the devil in a truly bizarre, and possibly evil, Guns N’ Roses music video.
He’s moved closer to the center with his later career work, but it was his role as John le Carré’s George Smiley in the film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy where he finally played the heroic leading man. True to form, Smiley is not a cookie cutter protagonist role, but rather a button-lipped cuckold who treasures secrets more than relationships. As this is a necessary adjunct for a master spy in the real world, he plays it perfectly, and his understated performance elevates this thriller into a thinker.
2 Anjelica Houston – The Royal Tennenbaums
Anjelica Huston‘s severe, solemn appearance and longtime romantic association with Jack Nicholson always gave her a certain darkness. She seemed pre-destined to play the gloomy Morticia in the film version of The Addams Family and its sequel, and her icy self-interest in Prizzi’s Honor garnered her an Oscar.
“I’m just like any modern woman trying to have it all. Loving husband, a family. It’s just, I wish I had more time to seek out the dark forces and join their hellish crusade.” -Anjelica Huston, as Morticia
Her role in The Royal Tennenbaums isn’t an ostentatious one. It certainly lacks the flair of Owen Wilson’s Hank Williams-inspired getup or the immediately iconic haircut of Gwyneth Paltrow’s forlorn Margo. But in the overcrowded genre of look-at-how-maladjusted-my-childhood-was scripts, it’s easy for characters to become caricatures as they fall further into a time-tested trope.
Meanwhile, there’s nothing about Huston’s Etheline that is unrealistic. She combines the qualities of a seasoned divorcee, a professional scientist, and a concerned mother with realism and texture, enough to hold together the more peculiar storylines swirling around her. In one move, her restrained, maternal presence dispenses maturity to the story while robbing it of saccharine disingenuousness.
1 Terrence Stamp, Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce – The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
General Zod, Agent Smith, Charley Rakes — there’s at least a dozen evil roles between them. It would be easy for the viewing audience to pinhole each of them as a villain, because they’re each so good at being so very bad, and all in such different ways.
Before many of those roles made them famous, there was the unstoppable force of comedy known as The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Back in 1994, it was a gutsy move for three cis-male actors to portray a trans woman and two drag queens in an Australian road trip comedy.
At the time, the cognitive dissonance in choosing actors with such traditionally masculine reputations was certainly entertaining enough for the ersatz American response, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, which starred Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze, and John Leguizamo. It’s a funny enough imitation, but lacked the lighting-in-a-bottle chemistry and sharp, derisive dialogue of Priscilla. Here’s a taste of Stamp’s Bernadette, in retort to a small-minded comment, that belongs in the best-of section of bawdy movie quotes:
“Now listen here, you mullet — why don’t you just light your tampon and blow your box apart, because it’s the only bang you’re ever gonna get, sweetheart.”
With that line, her measured tone of voice goes from sweet to sneering, and Bernadette disarms an entire bar of Aussie rubberneckers, unaccustomed to the protagonists’ lifestyles.
More than that, it’s so brutally acerbic, audiences couldn’t help but laugh along with it. After all, it’s we who are the gawkers, as guilty as any outback onlooker of staring, mouth agape, at a person we may not fully understand. As always, humor is the great equalizer, and Bernadette weaponizes it so perfectly that it exposes the vulnerable underbelly of her attacker. Even more, it makes Bernadette into just another trash-talking patron looking to get hammered, an easily relatable archetype in a small Australian town. Sometimes the hero needs a little bit of bad to do good things.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
