13 Movie Villains You Didn't Know Almost Played The Hero
The heroic near-misses that almost robbed us of some of cinema's best villains.
Sometimes auditions lead you to the opposite of what was intended: sometimes you just don't end up with the role, while other times the failed audition process can lead to a future role in the same franchise (as Christian Bale found when he was turned down for Joel Schumacher's Robin). And then there are the actors who turn up to audition for a villain, but end up being cast as a hero, like Gary Oldman's switch from Ra's Al Ghul to Jim Gordon, or those heroically aligned screen testers who end up playing the bad guy.
It is the last group who are arguably the most intriguing, for their crossing of the divide implies that the director saw something in their audition or in their general demeanour that convinced them that far from being convincingly good, the actors before them were inherently drawn to evil. In short, the actors failed so spectacularly to convince of their heroic worthiness that they ended up being the villain.
In most cases the truly iconic of villains require a very specific set of skills to bring them to the screen, and thankfully for the fans of the following characters, the film-makers managed to scrub away the shiny surface to find the capacity for beautiful badness beneath...