Anti Villain Examples: 12 Movie Villains Who Had a Point

Roy Batty spends Blade Runner as the thing to be killed. He has murdered his maker. He has the hero hanging off a roof by his fingers. Then, with minutes left to live, he pulls the man up to safety, sits down in the rain, and talks about everything he has seen.

That is an anti villain: an antagonist whose goal you can defend and whose methods you cannot. All Roy wanted was more life. These are 12 anti villain examples from the movies, counting down by how close each one comes to being right. Number 12 is a villain with a reason. Number one is a single step from being the hero. Spoilers ahead for all 12 films.

12) Thanos, Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

Thanos is the anti villain at his most extreme: he wants to save the universe, and his plan is to kill half of it.

• Release date: 27 April 2018
• Directors: Anthony Russo and Joe Russo
• Character: Thanos (Josh Brolin, in performance capture)
• Type of anti villain: Well-intentioned
• What he wants: A universe that does not starve itself to death
• The line he crosses: Wiping out half of all life, chosen at random
• Awards: One Oscar nomination, for Visual Effects
• Fun fact: Brolin compared Thanos to Quasimodo, an outcast judged on sight. Joe Russo pointed him to The Godfather for the tone of the performance

Anti villain example:

Infinity War is built like a hero’s story with the wrong man in the lead. Thanos has the quest, the losses and the final shot. On the ruins of Titan, his home, he explains himself: too many mouths, not enough to go round. He offered his people the same cure once. They refused, and the planet died.

The film tests whether he means it. To win the Soul Stone he has to give up someone he loves. He throws his adopted daughter Gamora off a cliff, and he weeps while he does it.

He sits at 12 because his logic does not survive a second look. A being who can rewrite reality could double the food. He chooses the snap.

Why it matters: Give your antagonist a problem the audience accepts as real. Then give him a solution they cannot accept. The gap between the two is the character.

11) Ozymandias, Watchmen (2009)

Adrian Veidt ends the Cold War in an afternoon, and the price is 15 million lives and a lie the survivors must keep for ever.

• Release date: 6 March 2009
• Director: Zack Snyder
• Character: Adrian Veidt / Ozymandias (Matthew Goode)
• Type of anti villain: Well-intentioned
• What he wants: To stop a nuclear war between America and the Soviet Union
• The line he crosses: Destroying cities himself and framing a friend for it
• Awards: None at the Oscars
• Fun fact: Goode played Veidt with a German accent in private scenes and an American one in public. He imagined a man who had rejected his parents’ Nazi past and rebuilt himself from nothing

Anti villain example:

Veidt is the smartest man in the world, and he has done the sums. War is coming. It will kill billions. So he rigs energy reactors in New York and other cities to explode and makes it look like the work of Doctor Manhattan, the one being both superpowers fear. Faced with a common enemy, the two sides make peace.

The cruel part is that it works. The other heroes arrive too late, look at the television news and agree to stay silent. The one who refuses, Rorschach, is killed to protect the peace.

Veidt is not punished. The film leaves him alone in his Antarctic base with what he has done. It is one of the clearest examples of utilitarianism in movies, the sum that says 15 million lives are a fair price for billions.

Why it matters: An anti villain does not have to lose. Letting the plan succeed forces the audience to decide for themselves whether it was worth it.

10) Magneto, X-Men (2000)

Magneto’s fear is the best-founded of any villain in comic book film, because the film opens by showing where it comes from.

• Release date: 14 July 2000
• Director: Bryan Singer
• Character: Erik Lehnsherr / Magneto (Ian McKellen)
• Type of anti villain: Well-intentioned
• What he wants: Safety for mutants before humans turn on them
• The line he crosses: Willing to kill a teenage girl to power his machine
• Awards: None at the Oscars
• Fun fact: McKellen turned down a part in Mission: Impossible 2 so that he could make X-Men and The Lord of the Rings. Singer said the actor responded to the script as an allegory for gay rights

Anti villain example:

Poland, 1944. A boy is dragged from his parents at the gates of Auschwitz, and the metal gates bend towards him. That is the first scene of the film. Every later scene with Magneto is read through it.

So when a US senator proposes a register of mutants, Magneto has seen this before. His answer is a machine that turns humans into mutants, aimed at a summit of world leaders. Make them like us and they cannot hunt us. The machine needs a power source, and he picks Rogue, knowing it will kill her.

His oldest friend, Charles Xavier, agrees with the diagnosis and rejects the cure. The film ends with the two of them playing chess in a plastic prison, still arguing.

Why it matters: Put the origin of the fear on screen, early, and the audience will carry it for you. One scene of backstory bought Magneto 20 years of sympathy.

9) Koba, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

Koba is right not to trust humans and wrong about everything that follows from it.

• Release date: 11 July 2014
• Director: Matt Reeves
• Character: Koba (Toby Kebbell, in performance capture)
• Type of anti villain: Pitiable
• What he wants: A world where no human can ever cage an ape again
• The line he crosses: Shooting his own leader and killing an ape who will not follow him
• Awards: One Oscar nomination, for Visual Effects
• Fun fact: The cast list describes Koba as a bonobo whose abusive past gave him a vendetta against humans. His history is from the previous film, where he was a laboratory animal

Anti villain example:

Caesar, the ape leader, was raised by a kind man. Koba was raised in laboratories. When Caesar asks him to trust the human survivors, Koba points to his scars one at a time and names what they are: human work.

Then he finds the humans’ armoury and decides peace is a trap. He shoots Caesar, blames the humans, and leads the apes to war. A young ape, Ash, refuses to kill an unarmed man. Koba throws him to his death. The apes had one law, that ape does not kill ape, and Koba breaks it.

Caesar’s verdict at the end is the saddest line in the series. He tells Koba he is no longer an ape, and lets him fall.

Why it matters: A pitiable anti villain needs a wound the audience has seen or can imagine. Pity gets them halfway. What he does with the wound is what makes him the antagonist.

8) Inspector Javert, Les Misérables (2012)

Javert has no malice in him at all. He believes in the law the way other men believe in God, and it destroys him.

• Release date: 25 December 2012 (US), 11 January 2013 (UK)
• Director: Tom Hooper
• Character: Inspector Javert (Russell Crowe)
• Type of anti villain: Noble
• What he wants: Justice, applied to everyone, himself included
• The line he crosses: Hunting a good man for decades over a stolen loaf and a broken parole
• Awards: 3 Oscars from 8 nominations, including Best Supporting Actress for Anne Hathaway
• Fun fact: Crowe was unsure about the character until he met Hooper, and came away determined to play him. His singing drew criticism. Hooper’s reply was that he loved him in the film

Anti villain example:

Jean Valjean broke parole. Javert is a policeman. For him that is the whole story. People are what the law says they are, and a convict stays a convict. He is not corrupt and he is not cruel for pleasure. When he thinks he has accused an innocent man, he asks to be dismissed.

At the barricade, the rebels hand Javert to Valjean to be shot. Valjean cuts him loose and fires into the air. Later Javert has Valjean at gunpoint in the sewers and lets him pass.

He cannot live with either act. A criminal has shown him mercy, and he has returned it, and his rulebook has no page for that. He walks to a bridge over the Seine.

Why it matters: The noble anti villain runs on a code. To break him, you do not defeat the code. You show him one case it cannot handle.

7) General Hummel, The Rock (1996)

Frank Hummel takes 81 hostages to make the government pay its debts to dead soldiers, and he never intends to hurt one of them.

• Release date: 7 June 1996
• Director: Michael Bay
• Character: Brigadier General Francis X. Hummel (Ed Harris)
• Type of anti villain: Noble
• What he wants: Compensation for the families of men who died on secret missions under his command
• The line he crosses: Stealing nerve gas and pointing it at San Francisco
• Awards: One Oscar nomination, for Sound
• Fun fact: The cast list describes Hummel as a highly decorated Black Ops officer. The film’s hero, Mason, sizes him up in one line: a man of honour who has no intention of killing innocents

Anti villain example:

The film opens at a graveside in the rain. Hummel lays his medals on his wife’s headstone and tells her he has tried everything else. Then he steals 15 rockets of VX gas, takes Alcatraz and asks for $100 million. The money is for the families the Pentagon never paid.

When the deadline passes, his officers push him to launch. He fires one rocket and steers it into the sea. It was always a bluff. His men did not sign up for a bluff, and they turn on him.

Hummel dies in the shoot-out, using his last breath to tell the hero where the final rocket is.

Why it matters: Watch where the threat comes from once the anti villain shows his hand. Bay’s film swaps antagonists at the end of act two. The general was never the danger. The men who followed him for money were.

6) Draco Malfoy, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

Draco spends five films as a school bully and the sixth as a frightened boy who has been handed a murder to commit.

• Release date: 15 July 2009
• Director: David Yates
• Character: Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton)
• Type of anti villain: Pitiable
• What he wants: To keep himself and his parents alive
• The line he crosses: A cursed necklace and a poisoned bottle that nearly kill two classmates
• Awards: One Oscar nomination, for Cinematography. Felton won Best Villain at the 2010 MTV Movie Awards
• Fun fact: That MTV award is the joke of this entry. By the end of the film he won it for, Draco is the one character who cannot go through with being a villain

Anti villain example:

Voldemort gives Draco a task: kill Dumbledore. It is a punishment aimed at the boy’s father, and everyone expects him to fail. Draco spends the year repairing a Vanishing Cabinet to let Death Eaters into the school, and the film keeps cutting to him alone, thinner and greyer each time.

On the Astronomy Tower he disarms Dumbledore and has him at wand point. Dumbledore speaks to him gently. Draco hesitates. He cannot do it, and Snape steps in and does it for him.

If you want to see the castle, read where Harry Potter was filmed.

Why it matters: The test of a pitiable anti villain is the moment of choice. Give them the weapon and the target and see what they do. Draco’s arm drops, and six films of sneering are redefined.

5) The Monster, Frankenstein (1931)

Frankenstein’s Monster is the first great anti villain of the sound era: a killer who has no idea what killing is.

• Release date: 4 December 1931
• Director: James Whale
• Character: The Monster (Boris Karloff)
• Type of anti villain: Pitiable
• What he wants: Light, kindness and someone who does not scream
• The line he crosses: He drowns a child, without meaning to
• Awards: National Film Registry, 1991
• Fun fact: The opening credits list the Monster as played by “?”. Censor boards in three US states cut the end of the lake scene, and the footage was missing until it turned up in a British archive in the 1980s

Anti villain example:

He is a few days old. He has been given a criminal’s brain by mistake, locked in a cellar and tormented with a burning torch by his maker’s assistant. His first killing is of the man holding the torch.

Then he escapes and meets Maria, a small girl by a lake, who is not afraid of him. She shows him how to throw flowers on the water to watch them float. He is delighted. When the flowers run out he reaches for the only pretty thing left, and throws her in.

The village hunts him to a windmill and burns it. Karloff plays the last minutes as pure terror. The censors who cut the drowning made him look worse, because the audience was left to imagine an intent that the full scene rules out. For more on what they cut in those years, see our list of movies that broke the Hays Code.

Why it matters: Innocence and harm can sit in the same character. The Monster is the antagonist of the plot and the victim of the story.

4) Roy Batty, Blade Runner (1982)

Roy Batty wants what every person in the audience wants, which is more life, and the film never gives a good reason why he should not have it.

• Release date: 25 June 1982
• Director: Ridley Scott
• Character: Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer)
• Type of anti villain: Pitiable
• What he wants: To live longer than four years
• The line he crosses: He kills his maker and the gentle man who helped him reach him
• Awards: 2 Oscar nominations. National Film Registry, 1993
• Fun fact: Hauer rewrote the character’s dying speech himself and brought it to Scott on set on the day. Philip K. Dick, who wrote the novel, called him the perfect Batty

Anti villain example:

Replicants are built as slave labour with a four-year lifespan. Roy leads a group of them back to Earth to find their designer, Tyrell, and ask for more time. Tyrell tells him it cannot be done, and praises how brightly he has burned. Roy kisses him and crushes his skull.

On paper that is the monster of the piece. Then comes the roof. Deckard, the man sent to kill him, is hanging by his fingers. Roy’s own time is nearly up. He hauls Deckard to safety, sits down in the rain, and talks about what he has seen and how all of it will be gone.

The hunter lives because the hunted chose it.

Why it matters: Give the antagonist the most human moment in the film. Blade Runner asks what a person is, and its answer is the machine.

3) Carl Hanratty, Catch Me If You Can (2002)

Carl Hanratty is an honest FBI agent chasing a criminal, and Spielberg arranges the film so that we hope he fails.

• Release date: 25 December 2002
• Director: Steven Spielberg
• Character: Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks)
• Type of anti villain: In name only
• What he wants: To stop a forger who is stealing millions
• The line he crosses: None. That is the point
• Awards: 2 Oscar nominations, including Best Supporting Actor for Christopher Walken
• Fun fact: Hanks replaced James Gandolfini, who could not get free of The Sopranos. The real agent did not want his name used, so the character was named after the football player Terry Hanratty

Anti villain example:

Frank Abagnale Jr. is a teenage runaway passing bad cheques and posing as a pilot, a doctor and a lawyer. He is the protagonist, he is charming, and he is played by Leonardo DiCaprio. The man trying to end the fun wears a cheap suit and tells jokes nobody laughs at.

An anti villain in name only is an antagonist by seat alone. Hanratty is in the way of the character we like, so the structure of the story casts him as the obstacle. Everything else about him is heroic. He is patient and fair, and he is the only adult who notices that Frank is a lonely child.

He catches him. Then he gets him out of prison and into a job at the FBI, and the closing titles say they stayed friends.

Why it matters: “Antagonist” is a job in the plot and says nothing about morals. Flip the point of view of Catch Me If You Can and you have a standard detective story with Hanratty as the hero.

2) Erik Killmonger, Black Panther (2018)

Killmonger is the rare antagonist whose film agrees with him, and changes its hero to prove it.

• Release date: 16 February 2018
• Director: Ryan Coogler
• Character: Erik “Killmonger” Stevens / N’Jadaka (Michael B. Jordan)
• Type of anti villain: Well-intentioned
• What he wants: Wakanda’s power used to free oppressed Black people around the world
• The line he crosses: He kills his way to the throne and plans to arm a global war
• Awards: 3 Oscars from 7 nominations. The first superhero film nominated for Best Picture
• Fun fact: Jordan prepared by studying Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Huey P. Newton, Fred Hampton and Tupac Shakur. He kept apart from the rest of the cast on set, because his character is at odds with every one of them

Anti villain example:

Wakanda is the richest and most advanced nation on Earth, and it has hidden for centuries while people who look like its citizens were enslaved and colonised. Killmonger’s father wanted to help them and was killed by his own king for it. The boy found the body.

So his question to T’Challa is fair. Where were you? His answer to it is not. He burns the sacred garden, strangles an old woman who objects and orders weapons shipped to cells in every major city. He wants the oppressed to become the new empire.

T’Challa defeats him and offers to heal him. Killmonger refuses, and dies watching the sunset his father promised him. In the last scene T’Challa opens an outreach centre in Oakland, on the block where that father died. The villain lost, and his argument won.

This is the entry people mean when they search for villains who were right.

Why it matters: The strongest anti villain changes the hero. If your protagonist ends the film believing what he believed at the start, the antagonist was not making a real argument.

1) Sam Gerard, The Fugitive (1993)

Deputy US Marshal Sam Gerard is the closest an antagonist can come to being the hero without the film changing its title.

• Release date: 6 August 1993
• Director: Andrew Davis
• Character: Deputy US Marshal Samuel Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones)
• Type of anti villain: In name only
• What he wants: To bring in an escaped prisoner convicted of murder
• The line he crosses: For one scene, he says the truth is not his problem
• Awards: 7 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Jones won Best Supporting Actor
• Fun fact: The studio liked the character enough to give him his own film. Jones played Gerard again in U.S. Marshals (1998), with no Harrison Ford and a different fugitive

Anti villain example:

Dr. Richard Kimble did not kill his wife. We know it from the first reel. Gerard does not, and it is not his job to know. His job is to catch a man a court has convicted, and he is frighteningly good at it.

Their one early meeting is in a storm drain above a dam. Kimble, cornered, says he is innocent. Gerard’s answer is three words long and it is the honest answer of a man doing his job: it makes no difference to him. Kimble jumps.

Then watch Gerard work. He follows the evidence because that is how you find a fugitive, and the evidence starts to point somewhere else. By the last act he is shouting down a hotel corridor that he knows Kimble is innocent. In the car afterwards Kimble reminds him that he did not care. Gerard admits that he does, and asks him to keep it quiet.

Why it matters: Two good people with opposite goals will carry a thriller. Nobody in the chase needs to be a bad man. The bad man can wait in the third act.

What is an anti villain?

An anti villain is an antagonist who has heroic goals, virtues or a sympathetic reason for what they do, and who still stands in the hero’s way.

The word antagonist matters. An anti villain opposes the protagonist, and that seat in the plot is what separates the type from its mirror image. A villain wants something bad and does bad things to get it. An anti villain wants something you can argue for, or is a decent person on the wrong side, or is a victim who strikes back at the wrong target.

They are primary characters, not part of the supporting cast. We made that case in our ranking of secondary characters in film, which leaves every antagonist out for that reason.

What are the four types of anti villain?

The four types of anti villain are the well-intentioned, the noble, the pitiable and the anti villain in name only.

Type	What defines them	Also called	Examples from this list
Well-intentioned	A good goal pursued by terrible means	The well intentioned extremist	Thanos, Ozymandias, Magneto, Killmonger
Noble	A personal code of honour they will not break, in service of the wrong side or the wrong rule	The honourable enemy	Javert, General Hummel
Pitiable	A victim first. The harm they do grows out of harm done to them	The sympathetic villain, the “woobie”	Koba, Draco Malfoy, the Monster, Roy Batty
In name only	A good person whose only offence is opposing the protagonist	The hero antagonist	Carl Hanratty, Sam Gerard

The order of the types is also the order of the list. Well-intentioned anti villains cluster at the far end, because a good goal excuses the least. The ones in name only sit at the top, because they have nothing to excuse.

Killmonger is the exception, a well-intentioned extremist at number two. He is there because his film does what none of the others do. It concedes the point.

Anti villain vs anti hero: what is the difference?

An anti villain is an antagonist with good goals, and an anti hero is a protagonist with bad methods.

Both live in the grey space between the hero and the villain. The difference is which side of the story they stand on and which part of them is compromised.

	Hero	Anti hero	Anti villain	Villain
Seat in the story	Protagonist	Protagonist	Antagonist	Antagonist
The goal	Good	Good enough, or selfish	Good, or understandable	Bad
The methods	Good	Bad	Bad, or simply opposed to the hero	Bad
We watch and think	“I hope they win”	“I hope they win, and I should not”	“They are wrong, and I see why”	“Stop them”
Example	Richard Kimble	Travis Bickle	Erik Killmonger	The Joker

Anti villain vs villain comes down to one question: if this character got what they wanted, would the world be worse? With Thanos, yes. With Killmonger, it is a real debate. With Sam Gerard, no. It would be a miscarriage of justice, and he would be the first to fix it.

The same character can cross the line between films. Magneto is an anti villain in X-Men and close to an anti hero by the later entries in the series. For the other half of the pair, see our guide to the anti hero.

Anti villain or not? Six quick verdicts

These are the characters people argue about, with a plain answer for each.

Darth Vader: yes, by the end. In Star Wars he is a plain villain. By Return of the Jedi he is a tragic one, a good man who fell and who turns back to save his son. That fight inside him is number 19 on our list of internal conflict in film.

Batman: no. He is the protagonist, so the term does not apply. The real question is whether he is an anti hero, and we take that on in the anti hero guide.

The Joker (The Dark Knight): no. He has no goal you can defend. He says so himself. Chaos with a philosophy is still villainy, and he is one of the cleanest cases on our list of external conflict examples in movies.

Loki (Thor, 2011): yes. A pitiable anti villain. He learns he was stolen as a baby and raised as a lesser son, and everything he does is a bid for his father’s approval.

Walter White: no. He is the lead of Breaking Bad, which makes him an anti hero who becomes a villain protagonist. Seat in the story decides the label.

Hannibal Lecter: no. Charm is not a redeeming goal. Audiences like him, and liking a villain does not turn him into an anti villain.

How do you write an anti villain?

You write an anti villain by giving the antagonist a goal the audience can defend and a method they cannot.

1. Start with the grievance. What happened to them, or what do they see that the hero does not? Show it early. Magneto gets his in scene one.
2. Make the goal arguable. Write a paragraph defending it as if you believed it. If you cannot, you have a villain, and that is fine too.
3. Choose the line they cross. One act that the audience cannot forgive, placed where it costs them our sympathy at the right moment. Koba kills Ash. Killmonger burns the garden.
4. Let them change the hero. The protagonist should end the story having taken something from the argument. If not, cut the speeches and let the antagonist be a plain villain.

Conflict is what the anti villain is for. Our guide to conflict in film covers how to build it, and the screenwriting guide covers where it sits in a script.

FAQs about anti villains

The Final Cut on the anti villain

Twelve characters, four types, one question. An anti villain is an antagonist who makes you ask whether you are rooting for the right side.

At the far end of this list, Thanos has a reason and nothing else. At the near end, Sam Gerard is one line of dialogue away from being the hero of his own film. Between them are a policeman undone by mercy, a general who steers his rocket into the sea, and a newborn who only wanted the flowers to float.

The list stops at the border. Step over it and you are among protagonists who do the right thing the wrong way, and that is the anti hero. Start at the dark end with Travis Bickle and walk back towards the light.