Some actors are tailor made to play heroes. They don’t play a hero every time, like how Denzel Washington played a villain in Training Day or how Chris Evans took on the antagonist role in Knives Out and The Gray Man, but more often than not they’re firmly in protagonist territory. Then there are others who typically fall on the other side of the coin. Again, that’s not exclusively where they operate, but there’s an argument to be made that the antagonist side of the coin is where they operate best. The late Michael Madsen was one such performer, but he was far from alone in being an individual who could steal the movie away from whichever actor was playing the piece’s hero.
What follows are five actors (including the aforementioned Madsen) who have excelled playing villains. It’s not an indication of who they are or were as people, but rather how Hollywood has put them to the best of use.
1) Michael Madsen
With steely blue eyes that appeared to be doing a scan of your soul, Michael Madsen was perfect for intimidating gangster roles. And those are shoes he filled fairly often, especially under the direction of Quentin Tarantino.
Madsen starred in five of Tarantino’s films (including his cameo in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). The first time was the best time, as the torture-loving Vic Vega, AKA Mr. Blonde, in Reservoir Dogs. But he also stole scenes in the two Kill Bill films as Budd, who has a nasty run-in with a snake, and as Joe Gage, a member of the Domergue gang in The Hateful Eight. Madsen also played memorable, shady criminals in Kill Me Again, The Getaway, and Donnie Brasco.
2) Kevin Bacon
Actor/singer Kevin Bacon is a multi-hyphenate, even when it comes to just his acting. He can play a lovable hero in something like Tremors, a likable victim of a serial killer in Friday the 13th, a brave astronaut in Apollo 13, or, quite often, an incredibly smarmy villain.
Bacon has played the smarmy element to perfection numerous times, and he’ll soon do it again in The Toxic Avenger. What predated The Toxic Avenger? His work in Animal House, Criminal Law, The River Wild, Sleepers, Hollow Man, Trapped, Super, X-Men: First Class, R.I.P.D., Cop Car, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, and MaXXXine.
3) Willem Dafoe
Everyone who works with Willem Dafoe is quick to call him a very sweet individual, and one can pick that up themself just by watching one of his interviews. But man does he have a face made to play villains, and he’s really good at doing so.
Of course, his most iconic villain role is as Norman Osborn in 2002’s Spider-Man (with cameos in its two immediate sequels and a full return in Spider-Man: No Way Home). But he’s excelled playing villains outside of Marvel, too. For instance, in the late David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, as a fictionalized version of real-life actor Max Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire, and as mad lighthouse keeper Thomas Wake in The Lighthouse.
4) Anthony Hopkins
There is no one better to play a hyper-intelligent, dead-eyed villain that Anthony Hopkins. He managed to steal The Silence of the Lambs with only just under 25 minutes of screentime. And, with his return to Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal and Red Dragon, he was able to make one bad movie and one average movie (respectively) two movies still very much worth watching.
Hopkins again did the hyper-intelligent criminal thing in Fracture, which is a fun enough political thriller, but with his vocal role as Fats the dummy in Magic, he got to show a different side of his considerable range. Hopkins is always able to elevate even his most lackluster projects (even Transformers: The Last Knight, for goodness’ sake), like The Wolfman, in which he plays secret werewolf and not so secret terrible father Sir John Talbot.
5) Jack Nicholson
Usually when someone is first-billed, it means they’re not playing the piece’s antagonist. Not the case with Jack Nicholson, a man so talented that several times in his career he played what amounted to the secondary role yet was given (and earned) first billing. Most notably, there was his Joker in Batman and his Jack Torrance in The Shining. Plenty would argue that The Shining focuses on Jack as much as it focuses on Wendy, but at the end of the day it really is the story of a woman dragged to a hotel by her husband who then goes insane at which point she has to survive his increasingly intense wrath.
But he wasn’t done with villains after those two, as he also played, among others, the duplicitous, murderous, and at times hilarious Frank Costello in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (which, let’s face it, would have made a way better final film for the actor than the subsequent The Bucket List and How Do You Know). Even Nicholson’s protagonists have a way of straddling the line between good and evil. They’re almost always scruple-deprived, e.g. Robert Dupea in Five Easy Pieces and J. J. Gittes in Chinatown.
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