Word: villainously
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Pity the poor hero. Oh, he gets the girl and saves the planet, but where's the fun in that? Love and duty are a puny match for the epochal mischief a prime bad guy can stir up. The villain may be the supporting part, but it's often the juiciest--from the snake upstaging Adam in the Garden of Eden to Shylock eclipsing Antonio to Jack Nicholson as the Joker in Batman swiping the spotlight from (hmm, who was that?) Michael Keaton...
...always salubrious for the actors who play the nasties. Anthony Hopkins, who, as Hannibal Lecter, was voted the No. 1 all-time villain in an American Film Institute poll (and who is currently on screens as a cunning wife murderer in Fracture), acknowledges that "audiences are drawn toward the magnetism, toward the darkness. But I don't want to glorify them. There's nothing funny or sympathetic or redeeming about them. And I don't relish playing a guy who's immoral. I've got no kind of buzz off playing monsters...
...PEOPLE, LOCKED IN THE BASEMENT OF their dankest impulses, don't know they're bad. They think they're the good guys in a world that can't understand them, and must be punished for that mistake. Villains see themselves as victims. Actors in these roles are obliged to locate the ache or delusion at the core of the character. "The danger of playing a villain," says James Franco, who as Harry Osborn has been one of Peter Parker's nemeses in the Spider-Man films, "is that you ham it up and it becomes silly." Plausibility counts...
...Live Free or Die Hard, the fourth in the Bruce Willis series. "One person's terrorist," the actor says, "is another person's hero." His own, usually. "So you strive for that [understanding]. At the same time you throw your hands up and say, 'Look, I'm the villain in a Die Hard movie. Don't overreach...
Michelle Pfeiffer, away from onscreen roles since 2002, returns in three movies this summer, two--Hairspray and the fantasy Stardust--as a villain. For her Hairspray role of Velma Von Tussle, the ex--beauty queen who can't accept the races mixing on a '60s TV dance party, Pfeiffer trawled for sympathy: "Yes, she's a bigot, but she's also a victim of the era she grew up in. It all changed on her, and what was once perfectly acceptable behavior suddenly wasn't. I think that's sad." Whereas her character in Stardust, a witch bent on destroying...