23 Actors Who Have Mastered The Art Of Playing Villains

The Villains: Hans Gruber in Die Hard, the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series, Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd, et al.

The Actor: While many modern viewers may know him best as the conflicted Severus Snape from the Harry Potter series, whose definition as a villain is questionable, Alan Rickman already had a well-trod reputation for playing nefarious, reptilian roles long before he donned the robes of Hogwarts' master of potions. In fact, his breakout role came more than a decade earlier, when he played one of the most memorable villains in cinematic history - the terrorist mastermind Hans Gruber in John McTiernan's original Die Hard.

The Villains: Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK, Dracula in Bram Stoker's Dracula, Stansfield in The Professional, Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg in The Fifth Element, Drexl Spivey in True Romance, Dr. Smith in Lost in Space, Mason Verger in Hannibal, et al.

The Actor: Gary Oldman has played, well, pretty much everybody at one point or another. He's been Pontius Pilate and Commissioner Gordon, punk rock legend Sid Vicious and Winston Churchill and Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz. He's been a wizard, a spy, a rabbi, numerous scientists, and the devil. He's also played lots and lots of villains. His breakout performance for mainstream audiences was probably in Francis Ford Coppola's baroque 1992 adaptation of Dracula, where Oldman played the eponymous count under old age makeup, Victorian dress, and even several monstrous transformations. He even went toe-to-toe with one of cinema's most iconic villains, Hannibal Lecter, when he played (under acres of prosthetics) the sadistic Mason Verger in Ridley Scott's Hannibal.

The Villains: Colonel Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds, Chudnofsky in The Green Hornet, Cardinel Richelieu in The Three Musketeers, Walter Keene in Big Eyes, Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Spectre, et al.

The Actor: Already an established thespian in his native Germany, Christophe Waltz burst onto the American movie scene with the role of the villainous Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino's World War II opus Inglourious Basterds. The part nabbed him his first Academy Award, and led to a swell of roles in English-language films, most often playing villains. In 2015, he even took on the mantle of perhaps James Bond's most famous nemesis, Blofeld, in Spectre, a role he reprised in the climactic film of the Daniel Craig era, No Time to Die.

The Villains: Jack Torrance in The Shining, Daryl Van Horne in The Witches of Eastwick, the Joker in Batman, Colonel Nathan R. Jessup in A Few Good Men, Frank Costello in The Departed, et al.

The Actor: Jack Nicholson broke into the business working with Roger Coman all the way back in the 1960s, in horror films like Little Shop of Horrors, The Raven, and The Terror. By the time he appeared as Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick's legendary adaptation of The Shining, he had already won an Oscar for his lead performance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Jack Torrance changed the trajectory of Nicholson's career, however. Always someone who played outsiders and rebels, he began playing villains with increasing frequency, perhaps most notably when he took on the role of the Joker in Tim Burton's first Batman movie in 1989.

The Villains: Dracula in the many Hammer Dracula films, Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun, Saruman in Lord of the Rings, Count Dooku in Star Wars, et al.

The Actor: Has anyone played quite so many of cinema's most famous monsters and villains as Sir Christopher Lee? The imposingly tall Englishman has been Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Mummy, and many others. He's played the evil wizard Saruman and the Sith Lord Count Dooku. He's been the devil, a cult leader, and more vampires than you can shake a cross at, played parts as varied as Fu Manchu and Rasputin, and gone up against the likes of Hercules and James Bond (and even Captain America, in an ill-starred TV movie from 1979). And that's only counting the villainous roles in his prolific and lengthy career, which spans nearly 300 films.

The Villains: Max Zorin in A View to Kill, Frank White in King of New York, Max Shreck in Batman Returns, Vicenzo Cocotti in True Romance, Bobby Cahn in Wayne's World 2, the Headless Horseman in Sleepy Hollow, et al.

The Actor: With his unmistakable voice and mannerisms, Christopher Walken was already a star before he ever played a major villain, having received an Academy Award for best supporting actor in 1978 for his role in The Deer Hunter. His first big villain role was opposite Roger Moore as 007 in A View to Kill, where he played Max Zorin, a deranged tech entrepreneur and the result of Nazi medical experimentation with a plan to destroy Silicon Valley. He went on to play countless mobsters, hitmen, and other criminals, not to mention sleazy record execs and even a headless horseman or two...