Random Movie Stars You Forgot Played Villains In Blockbuster Movies (15 items)

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  (#15) Dwayne Johnson

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  These days, you can't throw a rock (no pun intended) without hitting a movie Dwayne Johnson is in, but back in 2001, he was much better known as a wrestling personality. In fact, while The Rock had made a handful of dramatic appearances in TV shows, Johnson's role as the Scorpion King in 2001's The Mummy Returns was actually his big-screen debut. Too bad he had to spend a large chunk of it as just a head dodgily CG'd onto a giant scorpion body.

  That doesn't seem to have impaired his breakthrough from the world of wrestling into the world of tentpole movies, however. Since The Mummy Returns, Johnson has become a central character in the blockbuster Fast & Furious franchise, not to mention taking lead roles in flicks like Jumanji, Rampage, the first G.I. Joe sequel, and Doom, as well as lending his voice to Disney's Moana. And in an industry dominated by superhero films, that career path has led inexorably to his forthcoming turn as the eponymous (anti)superhero Black Adam for DC.
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  (#5) Robert Downey Jr.

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  Today, we know him as Iron Man, but in 1998, Robert Downey Jr. was known primarily for his substance use problems and the "bad boy" image he earned as a result. He was arrested in 1996, and again in 1997 and 1999, when he was ultimately sentenced to three years at the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison. That made casting him as the villain in U.S. Marshals, the big-budget flick following Tommy Lee Jones's character from The Fugitive, a gamble, in spite of the fact that Downey had a breakout performance a decade earlier in Less Than Zero.

  In between arrests and stints behind bars, Downey managed to film a couple of high-profile thrillers around the same time, including a gig as the long-haired serial killer Vivian Thompson in Neil Jordan's In Dreams, opposite Annette Bening the same year she essayed a central role in American Beauty. Fortunately for Downey, he would eventually shed his "bad boy" persona - even poking fun at it in Tropic Thunder - and make a major career comeback with his turn as Tony Stark.
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  (#3) Christian Bale

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  Christian Bale was a child actor who had parts in films like Empire of the Sun, Mio in the Land of Faraway, and Newsies, but his breakout role as a grown-up actor came in 2000 when he played the lead in Mary Harron's extremely controversial adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho. That same year, Bale also played a forgotten villain role, starring opposite Samuel L. Jackson in John Singleton's remake/sequel to Shaft.

  Creating a foil for Jackson's John Shaft II, a relative of the original Shaft, Bale plays Walter Wade Jr., a wealthy and racist trust fund jerk who skips bail after Shaft punches him. Following on the heels of American Psycho and Shaft, Bale started headlining bigger action movies, beginning with things like Reign of Fire and Equilibrium before moving on to his biggest role to date, playing Batman/Bruce Wayne in Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy.
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  (#2) Tom Hardy

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  Long before he starred in flicks like Mad Max: Fury Road and Venom, and fully a decade before his controversial turn as the villain Bane in The Dark Knight Rises or even his breakout performance in the 2008 biopic Bronson, Tom Hardy played one of his first roles opposite no less than the crew of the starship Enterprise.

  In 2002's Star Trek: Nemesis, the last of the Next Generation films before J.J. Abrams's reboot of the series kicked off in 2009, Hardy plays the extremely bald Reman rebel leader Shinzon, who also happens to be a clone of Jean-Luc Picard with a plan to irradiate pretty much the entire universe. As Shinzon, Hardy gets to skulk around a lot in a long, weird Cenobite coat and creep on Counselor Troi, among other nefarious deeds.
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  (#4) Russell Crowe

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  Years before Gladiator, Russell Crowe played opposite leading man Denzel Washington in this near-future cyberpunk crime flick about a virtual-reality program created using the personality profiles of several serial killers and intended as a training tool. Of course, SID 6.7, as the program is called, gains sentience and a physical form and gets loose in the real world, where it's up to Denzel's disgraced ex-cop to stop him.

  Crowe plays SID (short for Sadistic, Intelligent, Dangerous) with a streak of cruel glee that makes him the highlight of the picture. It's the kind of role that shows exactly why he was about to start winning Academy Awards and headlining much more expensive projects in just five years' time.
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  (#11) Norman Reedus

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  Spoiler alert! Before he was Daryl Dixon in AMC's hit series The Walking Dead, Norman Reedus played the traitorous sidekick of the eponymous Blade (Wesley Snipes) in Guillermo del Toro's Blade II. Just a few years earlier, Reedus had starred in the cult flick Boondock Saints, but his working relationship with del Toro actually predated even that. Reedus can be seen in Mimic, del Toro's first English-language film, which was also Reedus's major feature debut, playing a brief part as someone who finds one of the film's giant insects.

  As Scud in Blade II, Reedus is front and maybe just slightly left of center for almost the entire film, providing some of its comic relief before the third-act reveal that he's a traitor who's been secretly informing the vampires all along. He also gets to rock a B.P.R.D. T-shirt just a few years before del Toro would bring the B.P.R.D. to the big screen in Hellboy.

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