Well, Danny doesn’t make the ratio!
The thing about Giancarlo is that he’s. . . pretty. Not scarred or exceptionally pumped or dumb. He’s always a really smart bad guy.
Did David Warner ever play a good guy?
Terrible episode - good character
Jack Palance.
Timothy Carey.
He was Chancellor Gorkon — the Klingon leader who, on ‘being commendable’, was meant to be somewhere between, like, Gorbachev and Lincoln.
Hey, wait a minute.
Kevin Tighe. He was a good guy on that “Emergency” TV show back in the 70s, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in anything since where he wasn’t just a complete sonofabitch.
Giancarlo Esposito was definitely a good guy in The Usual Suspects and Derailed. The former is not exactly a low-profile movie.
He was the club owner that hired Dalton (Patrick Swayze) in Road House. I thought he was a decent enough guy backed into a nasty situation.
double post - NM
He’s not a “scumbag” though, he’s a flawed character who has made mistakes and had ups and downs in life but generally tries to do the right thing.
Micky Rourke would not have earned so much praise for that role if his character was totally unsymapthetic.
He’s an anti-hero in that Tremors prequel.
“Scumbag” is such an infinitely debatable that it’s probably not worth discussing it here. Suffice it to say that I see that character as the kind of person who consistently make poor choices and uses them to drag down everyone around him. He’s not the kind of person with whom I would choose to associate. If that’s my flaw, so be it. I’ll own it.
I would see this as high praise for Rourke’s talent. The fact that he can take such an unsympathetic character and let us still feel something for him speaks volumes about the performer. Let’s be honest here as well, a character with “a constant stream of selfish and destructive choices behind him” cuts pretty close to the bone for Rourke. He understands that character in way that most of us couldn’t.
Don’t you think that’s part of the job description? Of course only the good ones can pull it off. I’m thinking Newman, Hoffman, Pacino…
I haven’t seen The Wrestler.
Bruce Dern would have to be up there
How about Wilford Brimley? When the characters he portrays aren’t dangerous or sinister, they’re stern and surly. I haven’t seen him in many films, though, so I don’t know about his career average.
I’ve seen Cocoon and cannot think of him as a bad guy. He also wants me to eat my oatmeal so I don’t get diabeetus, so he can’t be all bad.
I don’t get to see a large number of things, but Frank Langella springs to mind.
I can’t believe no one has mentioned Alan Rickman.
I can think of two good-guy roles for Wilford Brimley off the top of my head. He was the assistant nuclear engineer in The China Syndrome who heroically speaks up at the end of the movie, defending the Jack Lemmon character against the corporate slander that was trying make him out to be a nut. That was actually the first movie I ever saw him in.
He also was the kick-ass-and-take-no-prisoners assistant U.S. attorney general at the end of Absence of Malice who came in, almost as a deus ex machina character, to mete out judgment. A great scene: Absence of Malice Inquiry - YouTube
Other than The Firm, I can’t think of any bad-guy roles for him.
Greatest “crazy guy” ratio, maybe…