Movie Villains: So Bad They're Good

By RICHARD CORLISS

Pity the poor hero. Oh, he gets the girl and saves the planet, but where's the fun in that? Love and duty are a puny match for the epochal mischief a prime bad guy can stir up. The villain may be the supporting part, but it's often the juiciest--from the snake upstaging Adam in the Garden of Eden to Shylock eclipsing Antonio to Jack Nicholson as the Joker in Batman swiping the spotlight from (hmm, who was that?) Michael Keaton.

And is summer the season of movie superheroes? No: supervillains. They get the plot spinning toward catastrophe; its their lurid schemes the hero must rise to defeat. Especially in sequels, which will dominate the box office this summer, all the ingenuity not expended on special effects goes into the creation of really nasty villains. Greed was good to villainous Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. To the producers of this summer's would-be blockbusters, bad is great.

It's not always salubrious for the actors who play the nasties. Anthony Hopkins, who, as Hannibal Lecter, was voted the No. 1 all-time villain in an American Film Institute poll (and who is currently on screens as a cunning wife murderer in Fracture), acknowledges that "audiences are drawn toward the magnetism, toward the darkness. But I don't want to glorify them. There's nothing funny or sympathetic or redeeming about them. And I don't relish playing a guy who's immoral. I've got no kind of buzz off playing monsters."

For most actors, though, including the most distinguished, playing a rotter offers a holiday from more serious fare; a nice paycheck after all those worthy little independent films; a chance to retune the actor's instrument and play it in a darker, bolder key; or just the fun of being in a movie everyone will see. We heard from a dozen of them and squirreled out the secrets of their craft: the Seven Rules of Movie Villainy.

1. FIND A REASON TO BE EVIL

BAD PEOPLE, LOCKED IN THE BASEMENT OF their dankest impulses, don't know they're bad. They think they're the good guys in a world that can't understand them, and must be punished for that mistake. Villains see themselves as victims. Actors in these roles are obliged to locate the ache or delusion at the core of the character. "The danger of playing a villain," says James Franco, who as Harry Osborn has been one of Peter Parker's nemeses in the Spider-Man films, "is that you ham it up and it becomes silly." Plausibility counts.

It counts even when you're playing an Internet terrorist, as Timothy Olyphant is in Live Free or Die Hard, the fourth in the Bruce Willis series. "One person's terrorist," the actor says, "is another person's hero." His own, usually. "So you strive for that [understanding]. At the same time you throw your hands up and say, 'Look, I'm the villain in a Die Hard movie. Don't overreach.'"

Michelle Pfeiffer, away from onscreen roles since 2002, returns in three movies this summer, two--Hairspray and the fantasy Stardust--as a villain. For her Hairspray role of Velma Von Tussle, the ex--beauty queen who can't accept the races mixing on a '60s TV dance party, Pfeiffer trawled for sympathy: "Yes, she's a bigot, but she's also a victim of the era she grew up in. It all changed on her, and what was once perfectly acceptable behavior suddenly wasn't. I think that's sad." Whereas her character in Stardust, a witch bent on destroying astral princess Claire Danes, "is just purely evil," says Pfeiffer. "I mean, she eats the heart of a star!"

2. SEE THE GOOD IN BAD

KEVIN COSTNER, A BAD GUY IN Mr. Brooks? Not quite: he's driven to murder by his alter ego (William Hurt). "He has an addiction he's trying to keep under wraps," Costner says of his character. "In life, when we see somebody trying to beat something, we feel sympathy. There's humanity inside this hideousness."

Preparing for the role of the irradiated Sandman, a.k.a. Flint Marko, in Spider-Man 3, Thomas Haden Church researched the Golem of Jewish folklore and the Frankenstein monster--creatures as pathetic as they were horrific. He wanted to give a nuanced reading of a mutant steeped in self-knowledge. "I remember the performances of Lon Chaney Jr.," he says, "where there was the physical aggression with that kind of sadness and regret that he [was] physically aggressive and could terrify people."

3. PLAY AGAINST TYPE

"AN ACTING TEACHER TOLD ME, 'PLAY YOUR villain like a priest and your priest like a villain,'" says Olyphant. "That's good advice."

As Dolores Umbridge, the bureaucrat from the Ministry of Magic in this summer's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Imelda Staunton is a little bit priestess, a little bit villainous. Staunton, the latest in a line of top British thespians to visit Hogwart's, found it a tough balancing act: "The character has to be ridiculous and yet real and frightening. She has to be silly and yet not cartoony. It's difficult to gauge." The performance and the couture established an ostensibly soft side to Dolores. "She wears cardigans and pinks. She threatens, but if you don't listen to the words it's just a pleasant sound. She's gentle and pleasing. If she seemed hard, there would be no surprises."

4. NURSE THAT GRUDGE

"THE CLASSIC VILLAINS HAVE BEEN shortchanged," says Peter Dinklage, who's Simon Barsinister, the orotund baddie in this summer's update of the '60s cartoon series Under-dog. "They've been cheated out of something by the hero. They'll do anything to get it because they've been overlooked in the past."

That describes Rupert Everett's character in Shrek the Third: Prince Charming, who forms an anti-ogre posse of all the other fairy-tale losers, including Cinderella's stepsisters, Rumpelstiltskin and the whole sad crowd of fabled flops. Charming is their perfect ringleader; his very name suggests he was supposed to be destined for hero status. "He's a victim of circumstance," Everett notes. "He was brought up spoiled and good-looking in a culture of envy. He's quite naive and he never gets anything right. He just wants to get his happily-ever-after." And he would crush anyone for the chance.

5. PLAY THE HERO'S EVIL TWIN

HARRY OSBORN HAS BEEN STEWING IN rancor throughout the Spider-Man series--just as Franco has been skulking around the edges of the films. He's been ready for his bad-guy close-up for five years now, so, as he says, "it wasn't like I had to practice a villainous cackle or anything like that." This time, Peter has a triple-gaenger: as he recognizes and fights his own weakness for celebrity, he's up against Harry, who must avenge his father's death by killing Peter-Spider. "It's two superhumans battling it out," Franco says, "but it also has a personal element, like two brothers fighting."

Or maybe Spider-Man 3 has a quadruple-gaenger. Peter also must confront his photographer rival Eddie Brock (a.k.a. Venom), played by Topher Grace. "He gets very similar powers to Spider-Man; they work in the same place, they're after the same girls," he says. The difference: Grace can be extreme without worrying about breaking character. "When you play a protagonist, a bell goes off every time you do something outside the range of normal behavior," Grace says. "But when you're a psycho from outer space, there's something very freeing. With great powers comes great fun."

6. GET USED TO FEELING TRAPPED

IN A FANTASY FILM, THE VILLAIN OFTEN NEEDS TO look very ugly or old or outre. That depends on the skill of the makeup-effects artist--and the patience of the actor. "Putting on the makeup and the fangs took four hours," says Grace about his Spider-Man 3 rig. "Then another 45 minutes to put on the suit--and you can't go the bathroom in it, which is a problem they still haven't solved after three of these films."

In Stardust, Pfeiffer plays a witch who sometimes looks 20 (at 49 the actress seems to have been instantly time-warped to her Scarface youth) and sometimes 200, with frown lines and liver spots popping up in seconds. "What I didn't anticipate was the horror of wearing all those prosthetics," she says. "The hardest thing is sitting in that chair five hours while they're applied, and knowing you have another 12 hours keeping them on." Wearing all that wrinkly glop on your face is hard enough--but how do you act through it? "There's a certain lack of facial expression," says Pfeiffer, "so you have to go bigger and broader. Forget about subtlety!"

Not that she's complaining. "Your big responsibility is that they hate you. As long as you're hateful, you've done your job."

7. RELISH THE FANTASY

THEY MAY MAKE THE WRONG KINDS OF headlines now and again, but actors are mostly like the rest of ordinary us--except that they can pretend to be extraordinary, in ways nice or naughty. "Movies are the only chance you get to be a villain," Dinklage says. "You don't want to walk down the street and be a villain. But on film you can get away with it."

You can even get away with playing to ignorant assumptions--if you're Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat. Chow signed on to Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End to impersonate what he describes as "the Western audience's stereotype of the Chinese bad guy from the 17th century: long beard, long fingernails." But he didn't fret over the racial cartoonery. "I just let it flow. I'm a good boy."

And for one good baddie on Pirates, the rewards are great. Geoffrey Rush is back as Captain Barbossa, the ghostly seaman "so wicked that Hell spat him back out," Rush says. This time he has a central role, but that's not the only perk. His character is an action figure and has been added to the Disney parks' Pirates ride. "For every actor, no matter what territory you work in, it's a very important moment in your life when you see yourself in a little cellophane box, and then know that that figure will be 10 ft. tall in the Disney ride."

Playing a misfit pianist in Shine may have won him an Oscar, but look at the prize Rush won for playing a villain.

With reporting by Reported by Amy Lennard Goehner, Belinda Luscombe, Elisabeth Salemme / New York, Rebecca Winters Keegan / Los Angeles