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Vulture’s Guide to Casting Movie Villains

Just as movie studios have settled on a tiny group of near-indistinguishable hunks to handle the heroics in their tentpoles, right now they also seem to be casting only a select handful of distinctive-looking actors as super-villains, lowlifes, and sympathetic antiheroes. Just four, really: Jackie Earle Haley (he’s Freddy Krueger in this weekend’s Nightmare on Elm Street and was asshole-superhero Rorschach in Watchmen); Mark Strong (the villain in Kick-Ass, Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, Stardust, and next year’s Green Lantern); Mickey Rourke (Whiplash in Iron Man 2 and maybe Genghis Kahn); and Hugo Weaving (the bad guy in Transformers, The Wolfman, the Matrix series, and the upcoming Captain America movie, plus lovable terrorist V in V for Vendetta). But how to know who to hire for which role? We’ve created a handy flowchart.

Vulture’s Guide to Casting Movie Villains