The draw of playing a villain is foremost in many actor’s minds as they get to do a lot of scenery-chewing in some instances or something that’s just intense in another that allows them to stretch their muscles in ways they may not otherwise. While you may not want to be type-cast as a villain, those roles can be defining and are often – unfortunately – better written than the leading characters/heroes of the story, which draws a lot of people to the villain for the wrong reasons.

We’ll do this one in a two-part style that can be expanded on in the comments as always, but there’s always the villain of childhood, the thing we see early on that defines dangerous to use as kids. And then there’s something far darker we understand as adults that chills us in a different way.

For me, Darth Vader was a dangerous mechanical and unstoppable villain to pre-tween me that I grew up with into my teenage years. Later on, the one that chilled me and made me check my back seat of the car more than before was the introduction of Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. It took me awhile to find my footing in crime stories until later in my life, and mostly of the Nordic Noir angle, Lecter was one that highlighted the real things that someone can do and it chilled to the bone.