What Is a Tritagonist? Meaning and 10 Movie Examples

On March 25, 1991, the Academy handed out both supporting acting Oscars. Joe Pesci won for Goodfellas. Whoopi Goldberg won for Ghost. Neither played the hero, and neither played the hero’s partner. Both played the third most important person in the story.

That role has a name: the tritagonist. It’s where the scene-stealers sit. Kevin Kline won an Oscar from that seat too, and so did Cuba Gooding Jr. All four are on this list.

What Is a Tritagonist?

A tritagonist is the character who matters most after the two leads. They get less screen time than the protagonist and the deuteragonist, but they want something of their own, and they push the story in a direction the leads can’t. Take them out and the ending changes.

The word is Greek. Tritos means third, and agōnistēs means actor or contender. According to Aristotle’s Poetics, Aeschylus added a second actor to Greek tragedy, and Sophocles added a third. With masks, those three actors played every speaking part, so the third actor often played several smaller roles in one play. The tritagonist was also the lowest-ranked actor in the company. When the orator Demosthenes wanted to insult his rival Aeschines, a former actor, he called him a third-rate tragedian.

Merriam-Webster gives the pronunciation as try-TAG-uh-nist.

Tritagonist vs deuteragonist comes down to weight. The deuteragonist shares the story with the hero. The tritagonist has their own thread that crosses the main story at key moments. Below the tritagonist sit the rest of the secondary characters, from the hero’s mentor to the guy who runs the bar.

10 Tritagonist Examples in Movies

These 10 tritagonist examples count down from a Viking teenager to a fake psychic. Every entry names all three leads, what the third one wants and how the film did.

10) How to Train Your Dragon (2010)

A Viking boy who can’t kill a dragon befriends one instead, and the best fighter in his class wants to know why.

Hiccup, voiced by Jay Baruchel, is the village disappointment until he secretly befriends a wounded Night Fury he calls Toothless. Suddenly he’s beating everyone in dragon training, including Astrid, voiced by America Ferrera, the star of the class. She’s jealous, then suspicious. When she follows him into the woods, she finds the dragon.

Hiccup takes her flying to prove Toothless is friendly, and the flight changes her mind. On the same flight, Toothless carries them both to the dragons’ nest. Later, she helps Hiccup see that sparing Toothless was compassion, not weakness. In the final battle she flies in with the other teens on the training dragons. Toothless never speaks a word. His sounds were made by the film’s sound designer, Randy Thom.

9) Notting Hill (1999)

A London bookseller falls for the most famous actress in the world, and his flatmate keeps getting in the way.

William, played by Hugh Grant, runs a travel bookshop in Notting Hill. Anna, played by Julia Roberts, walks in one day and changes his life. Spike, played by Rhys Ifans, is the Welsh flatmate who eats mayonnaise thinking it’s yogurt. The morning after Anna stays over, Spike opens the front door to the press half-dressed and poses for the cameras. Anna blames William and leaves.

Spike nearly ends the romance. Then he helps save it. When William realizes he’s made a mistake, Spike piles into the car with his friends for the race across London to Anna’s press conference, jumping out to clear the traffic. Ifans earned a BAFTA nomination for the role, and Notting Hill became the highest-grossing British film of all time on its release.

8) A League of Their Own (1992)

Two sisters join a women’s professional baseball league during World War II, and their manager would rather be anywhere else.

Dottie, played by Geena Davis, is the best player in the league. Her younger sister Kit, played by Lori Petty, has spent her whole life in Dottie’s shadow, and the rivalry between them drives the film. Jimmy Dugan, played by Tom Hanks, is a former Cubs slugger whose drinking cost him his career. He takes the Rockford Peaches job as a joke and leaves Dottie to run the team.

Slowly, Jimmy starts managing. He also gives the film its most famous line, “There’s no crying in baseball!”, which made AFI’s list of the 100 greatest movie quotes. When Dottie wants to quit before the World Series, it’s Jimmy who tells her the hard is what makes it great. Jimmy is loosely based on Hall of Famer Jimmie Foxx, and Hanks gained about 30 pounds for the part.

7) The Sting (1973)

Two con men set up an elaborate hustle against the gangster whose men murdered their friend.

Hooker, played by Robert Redford, is a small-time grifter in 1936 Illinois. When he and his partner Luther rob one of Lonnegan’s couriers by mistake, Lonnegan’s men kill Luther. Hooker goes to Gondorff, played by Paul Newman, a legend of the long con, and together they plan to take Lonnegan for everything.

Lonnegan, played by Robert Shaw, is the mark. Every scene, from a rigged poker game on a train to a fake betting parlor, is built to fool him. In the end, he walks away without ever knowing he was taken. Shaw’s limp in the film was real: he hurt his leg playing handball just before filming, and director George Roy Hill told him to keep it. The Sting reunited Hill, Newman and Redford after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the #1 film on our deuteragonist list. It won Best Picture.

6) Tangled (2010)

A princess locked in a tower escapes with a thief, and the woman who raised her wants her back.

Rapunzel, voiced by Mandy Moore, has magic hair that heals and keeps people young. Mother Gothel, voiced by Donna Murphy, stole her as a baby and raised her in a hidden tower, keeping her there with guilt and fear. When the thief Flynn Rider, voiced by Zachary Levi, climbs into the tower, Rapunzel makes a deal with him to see the floating lanterns.

Gothel follows them. She makes Rapunzel doubt Flynn, takes her back to the tower and stabs Flynn when he comes for her. Flynn cuts Rapunzel’s hair, destroying its power, and Gothel ages centuries in seconds and falls from the tower window. Murphy, a two-time Tony winner, sings “Mother Knows Best.” Tangled is one of the best Disney animated movies, and at $260 million it’s one of the most expensive animated films ever made.

5) A Fish Called Wanda (1988)

A gang of jewel thieves double-crosses each other in London, and the American weapons man in the middle is the most dangerous of them.

Archie, played by John Cleese, is a stuffy London barrister. Wanda, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, seduces him to find out where her jailed boss hid the diamonds from their robbery. Otto, played by Kevin Kline, is her lover, posing as her brother. He’s a former CIA man who reads Nietzsche and believes he’s a genius. He isn’t.

Otto wrecks every plan out of jealousy. He tortures Ken, the gang’s animal-loving hitman, by eating his pet fish one at a time. He gets knocked out, stuck in wet cement and flattened by a steamroller, and he’s still clinging to Archie’s plane as it takes off. Kline won Best Supporting Actor for an out-and-out comic role. Archie Leach was Cary Grant’s real name.

4) The Princess Bride (1987)

A farm boy turned pirate fights his way back to the woman he loves, and the swordsman he beats along the way has spent 20 years hunting one man.

Westley, played by Cary Elwes, comes back as the Dread Pirate Roberts to rescue Buttercup, played by Robin Wright, from the prince she’s being forced to marry. Inigo, played by Mandy Patinkin, starts as one of the hired swords who kidnap her. He duels Westley at the top of the Cliffs of Insanity, loses and is spared.

Then he learns the six-fingered man is Count Rugen, the prince’s right hand. Inigo joins Westley, storms the castle and gets his revenge, with the line “You killed my father. Prepare to die.” You could argue he has the most complete arc in the film. Patinkin’s own father had died of cancer, and he has said he thought of him while filming the duel with Rugen. Goldman also wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. For more on the film’s storybook frame, see our allusion examples.

3) Goodfellas (1990)

A kid from Brooklyn grows up in the mob alongside two men, one smooth and one who could kill you over a joke.

Henry, played by Ray Liotta, narrates his life in the mob. Jimmy, played by Robert De Niro, is his mentor and partner. Tommy, played by Joe Pesci, is the friend with a hair trigger. He kills a young bartender for talking back, and he and Jimmy kill a made man, Billy Batts, for mocking him. That killing comes back for him. When Tommy is told he’s finally being made, he dresses for the ceremony and is shot dead.

There’s a case for Henry’s wife, Karen, as the third seat. She narrates parts of the film and earned Lorraine Bracco an Oscar nomination. But Tommy drives the plot, and his “Funny how?” scene is one of the best monologues for auditions. It came from something that happened to Pesci as a young waiter. His Oscar speech was five words long.

2) Jerry Maguire (1996)

A sports agent is fired for growing a conscience, and only one client and one colleague go with him.

Jerry, played by Tom Cruise, writes a mission statement about caring for clients and gets fired for it. Dorothy, played by Renée Zellweger, is the accountant who quits to follow him. Rod, played by Cuba Gooding Jr., is the Arizona Cardinals receiver who stays, after a long phone call where he makes Jerry shout “Show me the money!”

Dorothy is Jerry’s love story. Rod is his test. Rod turns down a safe offer and bets on himself, and Jerry tells him to stop complaining and play from the heart. On Monday Night Football Rod catches the touchdown that clinches a playoff spot, lies still on the field, then gets up and dances. The line came from a real Cardinals player, Tim McDonald. Gooding’s Oscar speech kept going over the music.

1) Ghost (1990)

A murdered man stays behind to protect the woman he loves, and the only person who can hear him is a fake psychic.

Sam, played by Patrick Swayze, is killed in a mugging that turns out to be a setup. Molly, played by Demi Moore, is the girlfriend he can’t leave. Oda Mae, played by Whoopi Goldberg, runs fake séances out of a storefront. Then, in the middle of one, she hears Sam’s voice for real, and she’s as shocked as anyone.

Sam needs her to reach Molly and to stop his killers. She poses as “Rita Miller” to close the account his friend Carl is using to launder drug money, walks out with a $4 million check, and, at Sam’s insistence, hands it to two nuns collecting for charity. She even lets Sam borrow her body so he can hold Molly again. Sam and Molly can’t finish their story without her. Goldberg won Best Supporting Actress, the second Black woman to win an acting Oscar, after Hattie McDaniel. Ghost was the highest-grossing film of 1990 worldwide.

Every film on this list leans on its third seat. Here’s how they did.

The Sting turned $5.5 million into $156 million in the US alone, the biggest return here. Ghost made 23 times its budget. Tangled cost the most and still made more than twice its budget back. The Princess Bride and Goodfellas made less than twice their budgets in US theaters, and both found much bigger audiences later.

Eight of the 10 films earned Oscar nominations, and four tritagonists won acting Oscars. The Sting won seven, including Best Picture. Robert Shaw, its tritagonist, wasn’t nominated.

What Comes After the Tritagonist?

After the tritagonist comes the tetartagonist, the fourth most important character. After that, the pentagonist is the fifth.

These are modern words. Greek tragedy stopped at three speaking actors, so the Greeks had no need for a fourth title. Tetartagonist follows the old pattern, from tetartos, the Greek for fourth. Pentagonist borrows penta, the Greek for five, and you’ll also see tetragonist used for the fourth seat. Scholars still argue over whether Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus needed a fourth actor, or whether the three shared one part between them.

A Fish Called Wanda shows how far down the ladder a good character can sit. Ken, played by Michael Palin, is the fourth seat, a tetartagonist. He won Palin the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor. Most films don’t need names below that. If you’re numbering your fifth character, you’re probably writing an ensemble.

How to Write a Tritagonist

A tritagonist earns their seat by changing the story at the right moment. Here’s how to make yours count:

1. Give them a want of their own. Inigo wants revenge. Lonnegan wants money. Jimmy Dugan wants to be left alone. A third character who wants what the hero wants is just extra help.
2. Give them the scenes your leads can’t play. Spike can embarrass William in ways Anna never would. Tommy can explode in ways Henry won’t. The tritagonist is often where the risk lives.
3. Make them the bridge. Oda Mae connects Sam and Molly. Rod tests what Jerry believes. Our screenwriting guide covers how to build a cast, and our guide to the character arc shows how a third character can change the hero.

FAQs About the Tritagonist

The Final Cut on the Tritagonist

A tritagonist is the third most important character in a story. They want something of their own, they cross the main story when it matters most, and they often walk away with the biggest laugh or the Oscar.

Who’s in the third seat in the story you’re writing? And what can they do that your two leads can’t?

For the rest of the cast, see our guides to the deuteragonist, secondary characters and the foil character.