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

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  (#1) Sam Rockwell

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  Veteran character actor Sam Rockwell is no stranger to playing villains and antiheroes. He played Justin Hammer in Marvel's Iron Man 2 and a prejudiced police officer in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, not to mention the President of the Galaxy in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a generic crew member in Galaxy Quest, sadistic prisoner "Wild Bill" Wharton in The Green Mile, real-life game show personality and (maybe) CIA assassin Chuck Barris in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and lots more.

  It would be easy enough to point out an early-career turn like his villainous role in the 2000 Charlie's Angels movie, but Rockwell was actually playing bad guys well before even that. In the first live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie all the way back in 1990, Rockwell plays the "Head Thug."
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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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  (#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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  (#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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  (#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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  (#6) Joseph Gordon-Levitt

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  Joseph Gordon-Levitt has what seems like a throwaway role in Stephen Sommers's G.I. Joe flick. Levitt plays Rex, the brother of the Baroness, whose apparent demise during a mission led by Channing Tatum's Duke is the cause of the schism between Duke and the Baroness, who were formerly a romantic item. Of course, this isn't the kind of movie in which Chekhov's Gun stays up on the mantle, so it turns out Rex is actually Cobra Commander in the guise of the Doctor, the film's disfigured villain.

  It's all a little convoluted, to be honest, but the point is that after breaking out in TV shows like 3rd Rock from the Sun but before hitting it big in movies like Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, and Looper, you can see Joseph Gordon-Levitt chewing some scenery under a bunch of prosthetics and a monocle, no less, in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
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  (#7) Oscar Isaac

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  Since his breakout roles in Inside Llewyn Davis and Ex Machina, it seems like Oscar Isaac has been everywhere. He was Poe Dameron in the most recent Star Wars flicks, showed up in Annihilation, played big bad Apocalypse in the X-Men movie of the same name, and more. But Oscar Isaac was already on the blockbuster radar even before those breakout performances. A decade ago, he played the villainous Prince John in Ridley Scott's deconstructionist take on the Robin Hood story, and the following year portrayed a baddie in Zack Snyder's stylized Sucker Punch, playing the hospital orderly-cum-brothel owner Blue Jones.

  Just two years later, Isaac headlined the critically acclaimed Inside Llewyn Davis, directed by the Coen Brothers, and the rest, as they say, is history.
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  (#8) Jared Leto

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  Director David Fincher was a hot property in 2002, coming off the success of films like Se7en and Fight Club. He opted to divert his success into the Hitchcock-adjacent thriller Panic Room, starring Jodie Foster and a young Kristen Stewart as a mother and daughter who take refuge in the eponymous panic room to escape three home invaders. One of those home invaders is none other than Jared Leto.

  These days, Leto is something of a star himself. He played the Joker in Suicide Squad and had a villainous turn in Blade Runner 2049, and he's slated to play the lead in the upcoming Morbius movie. But Leto wasn't exactly unknown even when he donned cornrows in Panic Room. He'd had a major role in Urban Legend, appeared in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, played the lead in Requiem for a Dream, and even worked with Fincher once before, appearing as the "something beautiful" that Edward Norton's character wants to destroy in Fight Club.
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  (#9) Timothy Olyphant

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  Timothy Olyphant has made a name for himself on the small screen even more than he has on the big screen, playing lead roles in hit series like Justified, Deadwood, and Santa Clarita Diet. That doesn't mean he's a stranger to the movies, though. He was the lead in the 2010 remake of The Crazies and a villain in Live Free or Die Hard, and recently he showed up in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood.

  Way before any of that, he made his feature film debut as the psychotic copycat Mickey in Scream 2. While Mickey is more pawn than villain, his is the hand that holds the knife the majority of the time, even if the plot is driven by Laurie Metcalf, who plays the mother of Billy Loomis, one of the slashers from the first movie.
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  (#10) Brie Larson

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  In 2010, Brie Larson played Scott's ex Envy Adams in Edgar Wright's adaptation of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a film that also featured a pre-Captain America Chris Evans in a villain role. Envy Adams isn't the film's main villain; that's Jason Schwartzman as Gideon Graves, the leader of the band of "evil exes" Scott must fight in order to date Ramona Flowers. But as the girl who broke Scott's heart - and the current significant other of one of the aforementioned evil exes - Envy isn't exactly a hero. 

  Her career subsequently rose with the likes of 21 Jump Street and Short Term 12, but Larson's big hit came five years after Scott Pilgrim, when she won an Academy Award for her lead role in Room. Within a few more years, she got the title role in Captain Marvel and headlined Marvel's first female-led superhero movie.
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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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  (#12) Daniel Craig

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  Before he was Bond, James Bond, Daniel Craig played bad guys in more than a couple of movies. He was a notably rotten individual in Road to Perdition, opposite Tom Hanks, but the year before that, he also played an unscrupulous treasure hunter in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, starring Angelina Jolie as the eponymous Lara.

  Craig's character, Alex West, isn't the primary villain of the feature - that title goes to Iain Glen, known to many of us as Jorah Mormont from Game of Thrones, who played Manfred Powell in the film. But Craig's West works for Powell and provides much of the antagonism of the movie - not to mention most of its romantic chemistry and its shirtlessness.
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  (#13) Christopher Eccleston

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  Christopher Eccleston was already a familiar face on British TV by the time he played the villainous foil to Nicolas Cage's professional car thief in the 2000 remake of Gone in 60 Seconds, but he was still five years out from landing the role most of us know him for - playing the eponymous ninth Doctor in the long-running Doctor Who series.

  In 60 Seconds, Eccleston plays Raymond Calitri, an entitled British smuggler and crime boss working in Long Beach, CA. Calitri compels Cage and his crew to swipe 50 high-end cars in 72 hours. "Compels," in this case, by sticking Cage's brother in a car crusher and threatening to off him if the car thieves don't deliver. As you might imagine, Calitri doesn't make it out of the picture in very good health, but Eccleston certainly did, going on to much greater fame in the following years, including that aforementioned turn on Doctor Who, not to mention other villainous turns like Destro in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and Malekith in Thor: The Dark World.
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  (#14) Tilda Swinton

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  She was the Ancient One in Marvel's Doctor Strange, where she got to slap Benedict Cumberbatch and Mads Mikkelsen around. She was, like, half the cast in Luca Guadagnino's ambitious remake of Suspiria. She played villains for Bong Joon-ho in Snowpiercer and Okja before he won the Academy Award for Parasite. She was the White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia.

  Before any of those things, though, Swinton had a breakout performance as the psychotic, androgynous half-angel Gabriel in Constantine, where she played opposite Keanu Reeves, Rachel Weisz, and Shia LaBeouf.
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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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