15 Anti Hero Examples in Movies, From Reluctant to Ruthless

In 1977 Han Solo shot a bounty hunter under a cantina table without waiting to be shot at. George Lucas has re-edited that scene four times since, trying to make it cleaner. He never needed to, because the shot is the reason we like Han.

That is an anti hero: a protagonist who does the right thing for the wrong reasons, or in the wrong way. These are 15 anti hero examples in movies, sorted by how far each one has drifted from a hero. Number 15 is a good man with a bad attitude. Number one is a hero only because a newspaper says so. Spoilers ahead for all 15 films.

15) Han Solo, Star Wars (1977)

Han Solo is the mildest anti hero on the list: a smuggler who insists he is only in it for the money, right up to the moment he proves he is not.

• Release date: 25 May 1977
• Director: George Lucas
• Character: Han Solo (Harrison Ford)
• Band: The reluctant hero
• The code he keeps: Pay your debts and look after your co-pilot
• The line he crosses: He kills Greedo at the table and takes his reward while the Rebels fly off to die
• Box office: $775 million worldwide, re-releases included
• Fun fact: In early drafts Han was a green alien with gills. Lucas first resisted casting Ford, who had already been in American Graffiti, and had him read lines opposite other actors. Ford won the part that way

Anti hero example:

Han takes the job in the Mos Eisley cantina for cash. He owes money to Jabba the Hutt, and a farm boy and an old man are a fare. When Greedo corners him, Han keeps him talking, draws under the table and fires.

On the Death Star he agrees to rescue the princess only when Luke tells him she is rich. After the escape he loads his reward and leaves. Luke is disgusted. So are we, a little.

Then, in the trench, with Vader on Luke’s tail, the Falcon drops out of the sun. Han came back. The Rebels also had Obi-Wan, who is number 6 on our list of the best secondary characters in film.

Why it matters: The reluctant anti hero needs one scene where the selfish choice is open and easy, and he does not take it. Everything before that scene is there to make us doubt he will come back.

14) Shrek, Shrek (2001)

Shrek rescues a princess from a dragon, and he does it to get squatters off his land.

• Release date: 18 May 2001
• Directors: Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson
• Character: Shrek (voiced by Mike Myers)
• Band: The reluctant hero
• The code he keeps: Leave me alone and I will leave you alone
• The line he crosses: He hands Fiona over to a man she does not love, to close the deal
• Box office: About $484 million worldwide. Winner of the first Oscar for Best Animated Feature
• Fun fact: Chris Farley had recorded nearly all of Shrek’s dialogue before he died in 1997. Mike Myers took over, then asked to re-record the whole part in a Scottish accent after seeing a rough cut

Anti hero example:

The film is a fairy tale turned inside out, and the first thing it turns is the hero. Shrek is an ogre who enjoys frightening villagers. When Lord Farquaad dumps every fairy tale creature in the kingdom on his swamp, Shrek does not feel sorry for them. He wants them gone.

So he strikes a bargain. He will fetch Princess Fiona for Farquaad, and Farquaad will clear the swamp. The quest is a property dispute.

He falls for her on the road, mishears one remark and delivers her anyway. It takes Donkey to shame him into crashing the wedding. Wondering about the studio behind him? We answer that in is Shrek from Disney.

Why it matters: Give the reluctant anti hero a selfish goal that happens to point the same way as the heroic one. The story is the slow swap of one goal for the other.

13) Deadpool, Deadpool (2016)

Deadpool tells the audience he is not a hero, and the film spends two hours checking whether he means it.

• Release date: 12 February 2016
• Director: Tim Miller
• Character: Wade Wilson / Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds)
• Band: The reluctant hero
• The code he keeps: He only hurts people who have it coming, and he will do anything for Vanessa
• The line he crosses: He kills for revenge, and he shoots a beaten enemy in the middle of a speech about mercy
• Box office: $782 million worldwide, a record for an R-rated film until Joker
• Fun fact: The studio sat on the project for years. Test footage leaked online in July 2014, the response was huge, and Fox approved the film two months later

Anti hero example:

Is Deadpool an anti hero? He answers the question himself, in narration, during a freeway massacre: “I may be super, but I’m no hero.” He is a mercenary who was tortured into a mutation, and he wants the man who did it. Justice does not come into it.

The X-Men keep trying to recruit him. At the end Colossus gives him the full speech about what being a hero means, with the villain beaten at his feet. Wade listens, nods and pulls the trigger.

And yet he shields Vanessa with his own body as a ship comes down on them. The film’s joke is that he keeps doing heroic things while loudly refusing the title.

Why it matters: An anti hero can say the theme out loud if he is funny enough. Deadpool’s direct address lets the film argue with its own genre.

12) Logan, Logan (2017)

Logan has been a hero before. In this film he is a tired killer who wants to be left alone to die, and a child will not let him.

• Release date: 3 March 2017
• Director: James Mangold
• Character: Logan / Wolverine (Hugh Jackman)
• Band: The reluctant hero
• The code he keeps: He looks after Charles, and in the end the girl
• The line he crosses: He refuses to help a desperate woman and child until he is paid
• Box office: $619 million worldwide
• Fun fact: Jackman took a pay cut so the film could carry an R rating. It became the first live-action superhero film nominated for a screenwriting Oscar

Anti hero example:

It is 2029 and the mutants are almost gone. Logan drives a limousine in El Paso, drinks, and hides a failing Charles Xavier across the border. The metal in his bones is poisoning him. He carries one adamantium bullet for himself.

A nurse begs him to take a girl, Laura, to safety in the north. He says no until money changes hands. He tells the girl that the refuge she believes in comes from a comic book.

In a hotel room the three of them watch Shane, the 1953 western about a gunman who cannot stay. At the end Logan dies holding off an army so that the children can cross the border, and Laura speaks Shane’s farewell over his grave. It is one of the great last chapters of a character arc.

Why it matters: An anti hero at the end of his life is a hero with the hope burned off. Give him one person to protect and the hope has somewhere to come back to.

11) Captain Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

Jack Sparrow does several good things in this film, and every one of them is also part of a con.

• Release date: 9 July 2003
• Director: Gore Verbinski
• Character: Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp)
• Band: The rogue
• The code he keeps: Freedom, his ship, and a loose reading of the pirate code
• The line he crosses: He trades a young man’s life as a bargaining chip to get his ship back
• Box office: $654 million worldwide
• Fun fact: Depp based Jack on Keith Richards, reasoning that pirates were the rock stars of their day. Disney executives asked if the character was drunk. Depp earned his first Oscar nomination for the part

Anti hero example:

Jack arrives in Port Royal to steal a ship. Within minutes he has dived into the harbour to save a drowning woman, which gets him arrested. The pattern is set. His decent impulses and his schemes are tangled together, and he is never sure himself which one he is following.

He helps Will Turner because Will’s blood can lift a curse, and the curse stands between Jack and the Black Pearl. At Isla de Muerta he bargains with every side at once and palms a cursed coin so that he cannot be killed.

He also saves Will and Elizabeth, with the single bullet he has carried for ten years. For the real islands behind the film, see where Pirates of the Caribbean was filmed.

Why it matters: The rogue is the first band where we stop being sure. A reluctant hero will come through in the end. With a rogue, the audience has to keep checking.

10) The Man with No Name, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

Clint Eastwood’s drifter is billed as “the Good”, and his business when we meet him is bounty fraud.

• Release date: 23 December 1966 (Italy), 29 December 1967 (US)
• Director: Sergio Leone
• Character: The Man with No Name, called “Blondie” (Clint Eastwood)
• Band: The rogue
• The code he keeps: He keeps his word, and he does not kill for pleasure
• The line he crosses: He leaves his partner to die in the desert over a split of the money
• Box office: $38.9 million, from a budget of $1.2 million
• Fun fact: Eastwood insisted on cutting his own dialogue from the script, which made the character quieter and stranger. Uma Thurman later named Blondie as an inspiration for the Bride, who is number 6 on this list

Anti hero example:

The scam works like this. Blondie hands the bandit Tuco to a sheriff and collects the reward. At the hanging he shoots through the rope from a distance, and the two ride off to split the money. When the partnership bores him, he keeps the cash and abandons Tuco in the desert, miles from water.

The title is a joke about scale. In a war that is wasting men by the thousand, a man who only steals counts as good.

Leone gives him one scene of plain kindness. Blondie finds a dying young soldier, lays his coat over him and lets him draw on his cigar. At the cemetery he takes half the gold and leaves Tuco alive with the other half.

Why it matters: “Good” is relative to the world of the story. Make the world harsh enough and a thief with two rules becomes the moral centre.

9) Max Rockatansky, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)

Max helps a community survive, and he does it as a fuel transaction.

• Release date: 24 December 1981 (Australia)
• Director: George Miller
• Character: Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson)
• Band: The rogue
• The code he keeps: A deal is a deal
• The line he crosses: He takes his fuel and drives away from people who are about to be slaughtered
• Box office: A$10.8 million in Australia. Five Australian Film Institute Awards
• Fun fact: Miller built the story on Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Critics compared Gibson’s near-silent Max to Eastwood’s Man with No Name

Anti hero example:

Max lost his family in the first film. By the second he is a shell of a man. He finds settlers defending an oil refinery against a biker army, and he sees a petrol station.

His offer is business. He will bring them a truck that can haul their tanker, and they will fill his car. He delivers. When their leader asks him to come north with them, he says no, takes his fuel and goes.

The bikers run him off the road and kill his dog. Only then, injured and with nothing left, does he offer to drive the tanker. It turns out to be full of sand. He was the decoy, and he never sees the people he saved again.

Why it matters: A rogue does not need a change of heart. Take away everything he was protecting and the heroic act is the only move left on the board.

8) Lisbeth Salander, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Lisbeth Salander breaks the law in almost every scene she is in, and the film never suggests the law deserved better.

• Release date: 21 December 2011
• Director: David Fincher
• Character: Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara)
• Band: The avenger
• The code she keeps: Men who hurt women answer for it
• The line she crosses: Blackmail, assault, hacking and the theft of a fortune
• Box office: $233 million worldwide. One Oscar, for Film Editing, and a Best Actress nomination for Mara
• Fun fact: Fincher said part of her appeal is wish fulfilment. She takes care of things, and she will only put up with so much

Anti hero example:

Salander is a ward of the state, and her new guardian uses his control of her money to abuse her. She does not go to the police. She records him, comes back with a taser, and leaves him marked and blackmailed into giving her back her life.

That is the pattern for the rest of the film. As a researcher she finds what she needs by breaking into other people’s computers. When the killer has the journalist Mikael Blomkvist strung up in a cellar, she arrives with a golf club and chases the man to his death on her motorbike.

At the end she empties a corrupt financier’s accounts. Nobody arrests her, and we do not want them to. She is one of two female anti heroes on this list.

Why it matters: The avenger band runs on a failed system. Show the official route failing first, and the audience will forgive a great deal of what comes next.

7) John Wick, John Wick (2014)

John Wick kills dozens of men over a puppy and a car, and the film arranges things so that it feels proportionate.

• Release date: 24 October 2014
• Director: Chad Stahelski, with David Leitch co-directing without credit
• Character: John Wick (Keanu Reeves)
• Band: The avenger
• The code he keeps: The rules of the Continental, debts paid in full, no bystanders
• The line he crosses: He was a hired killer for years, and his grief sends him straight back to it
• Box office: $86 million worldwide, from a budget of $20 to 30 million
• Fun fact: Stahelski was Reeves’s stunt double on The Matrix. In the original script the hero was a man in his sixties or seventies and the body count was 11

Anti hero example:

Wick is a retired hitman whose wife has just died. Her last gift, delivered after the funeral, is a beagle puppy. A gangster’s son breaks into the house, steals his 1969 Mustang and kills the dog.

The dog is the point. It is the one thing connecting him to the man his wife knew, and the film makes sure we feel that before the first shot is fired. After that he is a professional at work.

His world has rules, and he keeps them. The Continental hotel is neutral ground where no business may be done. The assassin who breaks that rule to get at him is executed for it by her own side.

It is also character. Wick never sprays a room. He finishes each man before he moves to the next. You learn his code from how he fights, before anyone explains it.

Why it matters: An avenger needs a loss the audience feels in the body. Make it small, personal and early, and they will follow him through the door.

6) The Bride, Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003)

The Bride has a list of five names and no doubts, and Tarantino makes us watch what that costs someone else.

• Release date: 10 October 2003
• Director: Quentin Tarantino
• Character: The Bride (Uma Thurman)
• Band: The avenger
• The code she keeps: A warrior’s honesty. She faces her targets and tells them why
• The line she crosses: She kills a mother in her own kitchen with the woman’s small daughter standing in the doorway
• Box office: $180.9 million worldwide
• Fun fact: The character is credited to “Q & U”. Tarantino and Thurman invented her together on the set of Pulp Fiction, and he delayed the shoot for her pregnancy and refused to recast

Anti hero example:

Her old squad shot up her wedding rehearsal and left her for dead. She was pregnant. Four years later she wakes from a coma and starts on the list.

The cause is as clear as revenge gets. So Tarantino complicates it in the first fight. The Bride and Vernita Green are wrecking a suburban living room with knives when a school bus pulls up and a little girl walks in. They hide the blades and make small talk. Then the Bride kills Vernita anyway.

She tells the child that if she still feels raw about it when she grows up, she will be waiting. The Bride knows exactly what she has just created, because it is what was done to her.

Why it matters: Let the avenger see the cycle she is part of. The Bride’s offer to the girl is what keeps her a character and not a weapon.

5) Inspector Harry Callahan, Dirty Harry (1971)

Harry Callahan is a policeman who decides the law is in his way, and the film dares you to disagree.

• Release date: 23 December 1971
• Director: Don Siegel
• Character: Inspector Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood)
• Band: The avenger
• The code he keeps: The victim comes first
• The line he crosses: He tortures a wounded suspect for information
• Box office: $36 million, the fourth biggest film of 1971
• Fun fact: Paul Newman turned the part down as too right-wing for him and suggested Eastwood. Burt Lancaster refused it over the film’s morals. The American Film Institute later ranked Harry number 17 on its list of screen heroes

Anti hero example:

A sniper who calls himself Scorpio has buried a teenage girl alive and wants a ransom. Harry runs him down on the pitch at Kezar Stadium, shoots him in the leg and stands on the wound until he gives up the location. The camera pulls back into the fog as if it would prefer not to watch.

The girl is already dead. The district attorney then tells Harry that every piece of evidence is tainted, and Scorpio walks free. He goes on to hijack a school bus.

Harry ends it at a quarry and throws his badge into the water. The critic Pauline Kael called the film deeply immoral. Siegel’s answer was that his cop is, in his way, as bad as the sniper.

Why it matters: This is the far edge of the avenger band. The cause is still one we accept. The method is one a free society cannot, and the film knows it.

4) Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Jordan Belfort robs thousands of ordinary people, and Scorsese lets him narrate it as the best time of his life.

• Release date: 25 December 2013
• Director: Martin Scorsese
• Character: Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio)
• Band: The hero in name only
• The code he keeps: Loyalty to his own crew, up to a point
• The line he crosses: Securities fraud on an industrial scale, and he enjoys every minute
• Box office: $407 million worldwide. Five Oscar nominations, no wins
• Fun fact: The real Belfort appears in the final scene, introducing DiCaprio’s Belfort on stage. The daughter of one of his associates wrote an open letter accusing the film of turning crooks into celebrities

Anti hero example:

Belfort’s firm, Stratton Oakmont, sells worthless penny stocks to people who cannot afford to lose the money. He tells us so himself, straight to camera, walking through the trading floor. Then he waves the details away, because he knows we came for the yacht.

This is the band where the word hero stops meaning anything except “the person the film follows”. He has charm, energy and a first-person voice-over, and those are the only things keeping us on his side.

He serves 22 months. In the last scene he is teaching a sales seminar in New Zealand, and the final shot is of the audience, leaning in, wanting what he has.

Why it matters: Point of view is a moral instrument. Put the camera beside a crook and let him talk, and the audience will go along until you show them their own faces.

3) Arthur Fleck, Joker (2019)

Joker takes a character who has always been the villain, gives him the protagonist’s seat, and follows him all the way down.

• Release date: 4 October 2019
• Director: Todd Phillips
• Character: Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix)
• Band: The hero in name only
• The code he keeps: He spares the one colleague who was kind to him
• The line he crosses: Six killings, one of them his mother and one on live television
• Box office: $1.079 billion worldwide, the first R-rated film to pass a billion
• Fun fact: Phoenix lost 52 pounds for the part and won the Oscar for Best Actor. Robert De Niro’s talk show host reverses his role in The King of Comedy, one of the two Scorsese films Phillips used as a model. The other is number one on this list

Anti hero example:

For an hour the film stacks the deck. Arthur is a party clown with a condition that makes him laugh when he is distressed. He is beaten in an alley, sacked, and cut off from his medication when the city closes the service.

Then three drunk bankers attack him on the subway, and he shoots them. Two of those shots are self-defence. The third man is limping away down the platform when Arthur follows and finishes him.

That is where the film splits its audience. Gotham’s poor adopt the clown as a symbol. Arthur smothers his mother, murders a former workmate, and shoots a television host on air. The riot that follows treats him as a hero. The film has shown us too much to agree.

Why it matters: Sympathy and approval are different things. You can earn the first with suffering and then test how long the audience confuses it with the second.

2) Lou Bloom, Nightcrawler (2014)

Lou Bloom is hard-working, polite and ambitious, and there is nothing at all behind it.

• Release date: 31 October 2014
• Director: Dan Gilroy
• Character: Louis “Lou” Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal)
• Band: The hero in name only
• The code he keeps: None. He has a business plan
• The line he crosses: He withholds evidence of a triple murder so that he can film the arrest, and sends his assistant to his death
• Box office: $50.3 million worldwide, from a budget of $8.5 million
• Fun fact: Gilroy told Gyllenhaal he saw Lou as a coyote, a night hunter who is always hungry. Gyllenhaal lost nearly 30 pounds to look the part. Gilroy wrote the film as a success story and gave Lou no arc on purpose

Anti hero example:

We meet Lou stealing scrap metal and assaulting a guard for his watch. Then he finds his calling: filming car crashes and shootings and selling the footage to a Los Angeles news station. He is a fast learner. At one crash he drags a body into better light.

He reaches a home invasion before the police, films the killers leaving, and cuts them out of the tape he hands over. He wants to be there when they are caught. So he waits until the men are sitting in a crowded diner before he makes the call.

His assistant asks for a fair share. Lou sends him towards a gunman he knows is alive, and films what happens. The film ends with Lou expanding the company.

Why it matters: The darkest anti hero is the one the story rewards. With no punishment and no arc, the only judgement left is the audience’s.

1) Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver (1976)

Travis Bickle ends his film as a hero in the newspapers, and he is the most frightening protagonist American cinema has produced.

• Release date: 8 February 1976
• Director: Martin Scorsese
• Character: Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro)
• Band: The hero in name only
• The code he keeps: He wants to save one child, Iris, from the men selling her
• The line he crosses: He sets out to assassinate a presidential candidate, and kills three men the same night when that fails
• Box office: $28.6 million, from a budget of $1.9 million. Palme d’Or at Cannes and four Oscar nominations
• Fun fact: Paul Schrader wrote the script in about ten days, after a spell of living in his car. The American Film Institute put Travis on its 100 Heroes and Villains list at number 30, on the villains side

Anti hero example:

Travis is a Vietnam veteran who cannot sleep, so he drives a cab through New York at night and writes in a diary about the filth he wants washed off the streets. He takes a campaign worker, Betsy, to a porn cinema on a first date and cannot see why she leaves.

He buys guns. He shaves his head into a mohawk and goes to a rally to shoot Senator Palantine. The Secret Service spot him and he runs. That same night he walks into a brothel and kills the pimp, the doorman and a client who are keeping 12-year-old Iris.

The only difference between the two plans is the target. One would have made him a monster. The other gets him a thank-you letter from Iris’s parents and clippings on his wall.

Why it matters: The line between anti hero and villain can come down to who gets hurt. Taxi Driver gives its lead a heroic result and leaves the man unchanged, and that is the warning.

What is an anti hero?

An anti hero is a main character who lacks the qualities we expect of a hero, such as idealism, honesty or mercy, and who still has the audience on their side.

The anti hero definition has two halves. The first is the seat: an anti hero is the protagonist, and we see the world from beside them. The second is the gap: something a classic hero has is missing or bent. Han Solo lacks the selflessness. Harry Callahan lacks the restraint. Lou Bloom lacks all of it and has only the seat.

You will see it written as anti hero, anti-hero and antihero. They are the same thing.

What are the characteristics of an anti hero?

The characteristics of an anti hero are a private code, mixed motives, methods a hero would refuse, and enough humanity to keep us watching.

• They are the protagonist. Without the lead role, the same person is a villain or an anti villain.
• They have a code. It is narrow and personal. Blondie keeps his word. John Wick keeps the rules of the Continental.
• Their motives are mixed. Money, revenge, survival or love come before justice.
• They cross lines. Each entry above names one.
• We understand them. Understanding is not approval, and the best anti hero movies play in the space between the two.

The anti hero scale: four kinds, from reluctant to ruthless

The anti hero examples above fall into four kinds, and they sit on a scale from almost a hero to a hero in name only.

Band	What it means	The test	Examples from this list
The reluctant hero	Good heart, bad attitude. Has to be dragged into it	Do they come through in the end? Always	Han Solo, Shrek, Deadpool, Logan
The rogue	Works for themselves. Does good when it suits	Would they help with nothing in it for them? Perhaps	Jack Sparrow, the Man with No Name, Max
The avenger	A cause we accept and methods we should not	Would you want them as a neighbour? No	Lisbeth Salander, John Wick, the Bride, Harry Callahan
The hero in name only	The lead role is the only heroic thing about them	Is the world better when they win? No	Jordan Belfort, Arthur Fleck, Lou Bloom, Travis Bickle

Female anti heroes fit the same bands: Furiosa is a rogue, Mildred Hayes of Three Billboards is an avenger, and Amy Dunne of Gone Girl is a hero in name only. For where the anti hero archetype sits beside the rebel and the outlaw, see our archetype examples in movies.

Anti hero vs villain: what is the difference?

The difference between an anti hero and a villain is that we are asked to root for the anti hero, and the anti hero still has a line they will not cross.

	Hero	Anti hero	Villain
Role	Protagonist	Protagonist	Antagonist
The goal	Good for others	Good for themselves, or good by accident	Bad for others
The methods	Clean	Dirty	Dirty
The code	Society’s	Their own	None
Example	Luke Skywalker	Han Solo	Darth Vader

At the bottom of the scale the limits almost vanish, which is why Travis Bickle sits on a list of heroes here and a list of villains at the American Film Institute.

There is a fourth type across the border: the antagonist with a good goal. We sorted 12 of those in our anti villain examples, with a four-way table of all the types.

Marvel anti heroes on film

Marvel anti heroes fight on the right side with the wrong methods, and film has made stars of six of them.

• Deadpool. The clearest case, and number 13 above.
• Wolverine. A loner with a killer’s past, and a full anti hero in Logan, number 12 above.
• Venom. In Venom (2018) a journalist shares his body with an alien that agrees to bite only bad people.
• The Punisher. An avenger in the strict sense of our scale, with films in 1989, 2004 and 2008.
• Blade. A half-vampire who hunts vampires. Blade (1998) came before the modern Marvel boom.
• Loki. An anti villain in Thor (2011). Later films walk him across the line.

Anti hero or not? Six quick verdicts

Is Batman an anti hero? No, not in the Nolan films.

The exception is Batman v Superman (2016), where he brands criminals and leaves bodies behind. That Batman qualifies.

The war inside Bruce Wayne is number 20 on our list of internal conflict in film, and the real Gotham is in where The Dark Knight was filmed.

Is Deadpool an anti hero? Yes. Heroic results, selfish reasons, and lethal methods played for laughs.

Is Walter White an anti hero? Yes, at first. He starts as a desperate man with a sympathetic reason. By the final season he admits he did it for himself, and he ends as a villain protagonist.

Is the Joker an anti hero? It depends on the film. In The Dark Knight he is the antagonist, so no. In Joker (2019) he is the lead, so yes, at the very bottom of the scale.

Is Tony Stark an anti hero? No. He is arrogant, but from the cave onwards his goals are selfless and his methods are fair. He is a flawed hero.

Is Katniss Everdeen an anti hero? No. Reluctance alone is not enough. She volunteers to save her sister in the first act and never stops acting for other people.

How do you write an anti hero?

You write an anti hero by deciding what heroic quality is missing, and then giving the character a private code that fills part of the gap.

1. Choose the gap. Selflessness, mercy, honesty or respect for the law. Take one away.
2. Write the code. One or two rules they will not break. Test it in act two and make keeping it cost them.
3. Pick the line they cross. Show it on screen and do not excuse it. The audience should wince and stay.
4. Control the point of view. Narration and time alone with the character build sympathy. Decide how much you want, and when to take it away.

For the person underneath, start with character development. For structure, see the screenwriting guide.

FAQs about anti heroes

The Final Cut on the anti hero

Fifteen anti hero examples, four bands, one sliding scale. At the top Han Solo turns his ship around. At the bottom Travis Bickle is thanked for a massacre.

Go one step past Travis and the protagonist’s seat is gone. That is where the anti villain begins. Start with Sam Gerard and walk into the dark.