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Luc Haasbroek is a writer and videographer from Durban, South Africa. He has been writing professionally about pop culture for eight years. Luc's areas of interest are broad: he's just as passionate about psychology and history as he is about movies and TV. He's especially drawn to the places where these topics overlap.
Luc is also an avid producer of video essays and looks forward to expanding his writing career. When not writing, he can be found hiking, playing Dungeons & Dragons, hanging out with his cats, and doing deep dives on whatever topic happens to have captured his interest that week.
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Great movie characters are compelling and entertaining, but some of them go way beyond that. At their best, these fascinating and often game-changing figures can alter cinema itself or even audiences' perceptions. They shape how viewers understand ideas like heroism, villainy, morality, and identity and become cultural reference points; modern myths, in a sense.
These iconic and outright revolutionary cinematic characters are the focus of this list. Over the last half-century, cinema has produced some figures so fully realized that they seem to escape their movies and live on in the collective imagination. The names below are the most memorable, shaping our perception of modern cinema and influencing everything that came afterwards.
10 Imperator Furiosa — ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ (2015)
Image via Warner Bros. Pictures"We’re not things." Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) is one of the most complete and radical action heroes, well, ever really. While Max may be the franchise’s namesake, she's the engine of Mad Max: Fury Road, betraying warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) by freeing his enslaved wives and attempting to deliver them to safety. Her character is defined not by bravado, but by resolve forged through trauma. Her shaved head, mechanical arm, and scarred body communicate history before she ever speaks.
The character is well-written, but Theron fleshes her out even more, once again flexing her formidable acting chops. She practically radiates clarity of purpose. Her Furiosa is driven by guilt over past complicity and a desire to dismantle the system that enabled it. She's a moral agent in a world where morality is in short supply. The world is apocalyptic and fantastical, but Furiosa feels real, going a long way to grounding the high-octane spectacle.
9 Amélie Poulain — ‘Amélie’ (2001)
Image via UGC"Without you, today’s emotions would be the scurf of yesterday’s." Amélie Poulain (Audrey Tautou) is one of cinema's most tenderly imagined protagonists. She's a shy, observant Parisian waitress who quietly improves the lives of those around her through secret acts of kindness. However, she avoids emotional vulnerability herself. The plot unfolds episodically, following Amélie’s small interventions (returning lost mementos, orchestrating romantic nudges, correcting petty injustices) all while she remains isolated behind her imagination.
The movie itself mirrors her quirkiness and creativity, overflowing with style and striking visuals. With a lesser filmmaker at the helm and a more conventional star in the role, Amélie might have just been a cartoon. However, crucially, Jeunet and Tautou make sure she isn't simply quirky for the sake of charm. Amélie's personality is deeply shaped by childhood loneliness and a fear of rejection. Her journey toward connection is tentative, anxious, and ultimately hopeful, resonating precisely because it feels earned rather than idealized.
8 James Bond - 'The Spy Who Loved Me' (1977) and after
"For England, James?" "No. For me." Limiting this list to just the past 50 years means excluding Sean Connery's legendary take on Bond, but even just including the incarnations from Roger Moore to Daniel Craig ensures the character's spot in the history books. Sure, not every Bond movie is great, and the different actors vary in their charisma and complexity, but, taken together, 007 is a fantastic character with a remarkable ability to evolve in step with the times.
At heart, Bond is a controlled embodiment of power. He has a license to kill, access to limitless resources, and permission to break laws ordinary people must obey. This freedom makes him dangerous and epic, almost like a superhero. Yet what keeps him compelling is that this power is framed as both seductive and corrosive. Even in the lighter eras, Bond exists in a morally compromised space, both charming and brutal. It'll be fascinating to see what his next evolution looks like, though even his existing versions will continue to delight audiences for generations.
7 Ellen Ripley — ‘Alien’ (1979)
Image via 20th Century Studios"I got you, you son of a b—h." Ellen Ripley’s (Sigourney Weaver) greatness lies in how naturally her heroism emerges. When authority collapses and survival becomes paramount, Ripley steps forward through competence rather than bravado. She doesn’t seek leadership; it finds her. Rather than being brash and over-the-top, Ripley is defined by rational courage, moral backbone, and grace under pressure. She has strong protective instincts and a remarkable capacity to endure serious loss, as well as a scrappy resourcefulness that one can't help but admire.
Indeed, Ripley redefined action protagonists by proving that strength could be procedural, intelligent, and emotionally restrained. Her victory over the alien isn’t triumphant, but exhausting; survival achieved at terrible cost. More importantly, Ripley endures because she feels real. She isn't stone-cold or flippant, but rather frightened, determined, and adaptive. For all these reasons, hearing her deliver the immortal line "Get away from her, you b—h!" is endlessly satisfying.
6 Gandalf — ‘The Lord of the Rings’ (2001–2003)
Image via New Line Cinema"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." Sorry, Dumbledore, but Gandalf is fantasy's most compelling wizard. He's a truly archetypal figure: mentor, mythic guardian, moral guide, the call to adventure itself. In The Lord of the Rings, he serves as both strategist and conscience. And, unlike typical spellcasters, Gandalf’s power is defined by restraint. He does not dominate events but rather nudges them into motion, trusting others to rise to their potential.
His greatness lies in his humility; despite immense power, he values fellowship, mercy, and hope above victory. Gandalf understands that force alone cannot defeat evil, only resist it long enough for courage to matter. That said, he's also simply badass, capable of remarkable feats of power and magic when necessary. His stand on the bridge against the Balrog is one of the genre's most iconic moments, as is his return as Gandalf the White. Only Ian McKellen could've made all this look easy.
5 Anton Chigurh — ‘No Country for Old Men’ (2007)
Image via Miramax Films"What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss?" Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is one of the most terrifying characters in 21st-century cinema because he feels elemental rather than personal. The plot of No Country for Old Men follows intersecting paths of crime and pursuit across Texas, but Chigurh exists outside conventional motivation. He kills not for pleasure or profit, but in service of an internal logic he treats as fate. His coin tosses reduce morality to chance, stripping victims of agency while absolving himself of responsibility.
In other words, Chigurh is chaos itself, a symbol for a world without principles, without salvation, without a higher moral order. He's an unstoppable force intruding into a society that no longer understands it. His calm demeanor and refusal to explain himself make him far more frightening than any slasher or zombie. Bardem rises to the occasion with a brilliantly creepy performance, one that instantly earned its spot in the pantheon of movie villains.
4 Daniel Plainview — ‘There Will Be Blood’ (2007)
Image via Paramount Vantage"I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed." Possibly the greatest performance of the 2000s, Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview as ambition given human form. The film charts his rise from solitary prospector to oil tycoon, revealing how success corrodes and isolates the soul. Plainview is brilliant, ruthless, and deeply self-aware. He knows what he is and embraces it, pursuing wealth and dominance at any cost, including the destruction of familial and communal bonds.
What makes Plainview unforgettable is his honesty about his own darkness. He doesn’t pretend to be benevolent; he despises humanity and thrives on competition. This unique and nihilistic view makes him a metaphor for the dark side of American capitalism, the profit motive unmoored from any moral grounding. At the same time, Day-Lewis and Paul Thomas Anderson make sure that he still feels human and real, no mere caricature. It's a tricky balancing act that they absolutely nail.
3 Hans Landa — ‘Inglourious Basterds’ (2009)
Image via The Weinstein Company"That’s a bingo!" Christoph Waltz earned Oscar gold and global acclaim for his turn in Quentin Tarantino's revisionist WWII epic, and for good reason. He's handed one of the most challenging roles in movie history and utterly crushes it to the point that it's hard to imagine anyone else in the part. He is S.S. Colonel Hans Landa, a detective turned Nazi officer who's multilingual, charming, and acutely self-aware — a man who understands the moral vacuum he inhabits and exploits it without shame.
Landa is also ferociously intelligent, dominating every scene through deception, threat, and carefully chosen words. Waltz and Tarantino wring maximum tension purely out of Landa's conversations. Yet what really makes him a classic character is possibly his adaptability. Landa serves power, not ideology, switching allegiances without hesitation. He's capable of betraying the entire German high command if it benefits him. He's not evil for evil's sake; instead, he has no operating principles beyond self-interest.
2 The Joker — ‘The Dark Knight’ (2008)
Image via Warner Bros."Introduce a little anarchy." It's been nearly two decades, and yet Heath Ledger's performance in The Dark Knight still casts a long shadow over superhero cinema. His Joker is not a criminal mastermind seeking power, but a philosopher of chaos. The film follows Batman’s (Christian Bale) attempt to impose order on Gotham, only to face an adversary who rejects structure entirely. This Joker engineers moral dilemmas rather than crimes, forcing others to reveal their values under pressure.
He wants to expose the fragility of meaning itself, to prove that civilization is a thin performance waiting to collapse. With no backstory and shifting explanations, he resists comprehension. As he puts it, the Joker just wants to watch the world burn. There's something borderline Satanic about his approach; his spirit is totally anti-human, rejecting even the most basic assumptions of society. This philosophy is one of deep, deep darkness, making him not just the greatest superhero villain but one of the greatest movie antagonists, period.
1 Travis Bickle — ‘Taxi Driver’ (1976)
Image via Columbia Pictures"You talkin’ to me?" Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) makes for one of cinema’s most disturbing character studies, a portrait of loneliness curdling into violence. In Taxi Driver, Travis, a Vietnam vet, drifts through nocturnal New York, increasingly alienated from society. His diary entries reveal a man desperate for purpose, repulsed by the city’s decay, and incapable of meaningful connection. As isolation deepens, his desire to "clean up" the streets becomes indistinguishable from delusion.
He is neither hero nor villain, but a warning, one that remains uncomfortably relevant decades later. He's an archetype, representing the grim places a certain kind of person can go once they're pushed to the brink. Ultimately, Travis is terrifying because he feels plausible, shaped by trauma, neglect, and validation that arrives too late and for the wrong reasons. Even today, the spirit of Travis Bickle is very real, the definitive anti-hero of the bleak '70s, who's bound to be with us for a long time to come.
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