I’m still politicked out so I’m going to put up a list of the twenty best bad guys in the movie business. These are actors who would, if I were flipping channels and saw these guys clutching a tommy gun and spraying a cop car with lead, make me stop and watch for a few minutes. Or they might break the tie if I were deciding between two schlock action films. I’m picking out actors here, as opposed to characters, and while you’ll probably find most of them somewhat pedestrian there were a few I had to look up on IMDB—they were always just filed under “Oh, that guy!” This list inclines away from horror and toward action, crime, and Westerns, but hey, so do I. So click below, and here we go: 20. Gary Oldman—If you can recognize him under all that makeup, he’s probably in there kicking some major butt. I think his turn as Stansfield in The Professional was probably his best, though Mason Verger was pretty creepy.
19. Rutger Hauer—yeah, a guilty pleasure, since he has been in some truly awful films. But The Hitcher gave me nightmares.
18. Lee Van Cleef—Dude got them crazy eyes. He was Good as the Bad in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and a quite menacing Frank Miller in High Noon.
17. Danny Trejo—If the Latin Drug Lord sends his enforcer after you, it’s probably this guy. He was Johnny 23 in Con Air, Razor Johnny in From Dusk Till Dawn, the nameless hitman in The Replacement Killers, and countless other cannon-fodder roles.
16. Ronny Cox—Sometimes evil needs a respectable, corporate face. It’s not all knives and nukes; there’s usually a WASPy guy with clean fingernails and a firm handshake calling the shots. Ronny Cox is that guy. Whether running a colony on Mars in Total Recall or an amoral corporation in Robocop, Cox is The Man.
15. Christopher Lee—The ubervillain. Scaramanga, Dooku, Saruman. Lee’s been in plenty of crap movies I’ve never heard of, but he’s been in some great crap movies too. This guy has led an absolutely fascinating life—he actually met JRR Tolkien and Lee's distant relative, Ian Fleming, personally recommended he be cast as Dr. No, though he later got into the inferior Man With The Golden Gun (and having reviewed that trainwreck on AMC the other day, I can say Lee was the best thing about it, except for Britt Ekland; rowr.). He’s also the reason I don’t need to include Alan Rickman in this list.
14. Al Lettieri—Had they been contemporaries, would probably have played Danny Trejo’s boss. The guy just seems angry all the time and he looks like Carlos the Jackal. But he’s got that elegant/sinister thing down pat. As Solozzo in the Godfather or as Santiago in John Wayne’s McQ, he commanded attention. “Blood is a big expense!”
13. Steve Buscemi—I don’t think I need to explain this choice. He plays a ratfink creep like nobody’s business.
12. Bill Duke—I love this guy. He’s always a competent, sober villain whom you don’t want on your tail—or when he plays a good guy, as in the head DEA guy in The Limey or Mac in Predator, definitely someone you’d want at your back. I first saw him as “Cooke” in Commando and he’s popped up everywhere since then. His IMDB entry is woefully incomplete, since it leaves off the Limey and his role as a corrupt cop in Payback. Ving Rhames without the twinkle.
11. Ronald Lacey—When I have nightmares about Nazis, they have the face of Toht from Raiders of the Lost Ark—sometimes in mid-melt. Peter Lorre was never so menacing. “Shooooot them—shoot them both!”
10. Ric Young— I first saw this guy in the Corruptor as the Triad boss. He was so oily and effete and Mephistophelean that I just despised the guy. It’s a good actor who can inspire such loathing that you actually dislike the actor, not just the character. But then I realized I’d also seen him as a fanatical Maoist interrogator in The Last Emperor and he was pretty good there too, as a completely different kind of bad guy. He pops up in the club scene in the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as well.
9. Sean Bean—Boromir, yeah, but also the backstabbing Alec Trevelyan in Goldeneye and even better, the unstable, sadistic Spence in Ronin. And he was fine in Patriot Games. Excellent Brit psycho.
8. Warren Oates. Sam Peckinpah used him several times and I can see why. HeÂ’s a little like #4 below, but more likeable and a little more country. His Dillinger was pitch-perfect.
7. Bill McKinney (honorable mention—Herbert “Cowboy” Coward). Don’t recognize the name? Maybe he’d prefer that. Burt Reynolds thought McKinney was a little too into his big scene in Deliverance. (I wonder how Ned Beatty felt? ) McKinney has ably played other nasty villains as well, like Captain “Redlegs” Terrell in The Outlaw Josey Wales. “Squeal Like a Pig! Wheeeeeek!”
6.Ian McShane—Do tell me how he’s doing in Deadwood. I know him only as the chilling, satanic Teddy Bass in Sexy Beast. I do not want to know him better. Brrr.
5. James Gandolfini. Not so much for the Sopranos as for his turn as a dead-eyed thug in True Romance. I thought at the time that that guy was going places. “Now I do it just to watch their expression change”.
4. Lee Marvin. A genuine WWII Marine badass, he could bring sociopathy to life like no one else—in the west, as Liberty Valance, or as a grim hitman in The Killers (he shoots Ronald Reagan, who did pretty good as a villain himself—in the sort of role Ronny Cox might play today.)
3. Dwight Yoakam—As Doyle in Sling Blade or as one of the housebreakers in Panic Room—or even in a quick cameo in Red Rock West—Dwight’s got the feral cranked-up psycho thing down really well. I know people that look and act like that and I don’t mess with them. I think he’s ready for a big-time role as a villain.
2. Powers Boothe. What a likeable villain. I was hoping heÂ’d kick Van DammeÂ’s Belgian gluteus in Sudden Death. And he was wonderfully hammy in Extreme Prejudice. But IÂ’ll let Dave at Garfield Ridge explain more of BootheÂ’s mystique since heÂ’s, er, quite taken with BootheÂ’s powers.
1. Why, Walken, of course. His only false note as a villain was in Things to do in Denver When you’re Dead, and that film was so bad anyway that it just doesn’t matter—if there’s a film in which to lay an egg, that’s it. King of New York, for my money, was his best performance.

Okay guys, in a fight between Walken and Powers Boothe, who would win? And who have I left out of this list? I might consider updating this with a few more (or less) names in the near future.

NB There arenÂ’t any women on this list because I canÂ’t recall any really memorable or credible female villains except for Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, which was fine but not quite enough for this list. Lotte Lenya as Rosa Klebb was originally on here but thatÂ’s the only thing she ever did. There are plenty of bad girls in Bond films, etc., but aside from Lenya no one IÂ’d sit through a movie to watch, at least for their villainous acting.

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