Every James Bond Villain Ranked Worst To Best

30. Gustav Graves - Die Another Day

Starting off with the worst of the worst, we have the main villain of Die Another Day: Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens), a British billionaire... only he's actually a North Korean colonel who's undergone gene therapy. Yes, really. Somehow, this character is even worse than that description suggests.

Essentially, Graves is a cautionary tale of just how badly wrong action movie villains can go. He's far too derivative of past Bond villains, he's about as scary as a basket of baby kittens, he feels more like an angry schoolboy than an evil genius and he's just a hammy, excruciatingly annoying embarrassment all around.

He's also a tragic waste of Toby Stephens, who is actually a really good actor, and as it should go without saying, the twist about the literal white-washing has not aged well at all.

What makes this character even worse is that he was so easy to fix.

Had the film stuck with the North Korean version of the character (played by Will Yun Lee, a more than capable actor) and kept him grounded, this villain could definitely have worked. After all, his big scheme - to destroy the Korean DMZ with a weaponized satellite and allow the North to invade the South - is quite interesting and the character definitely had potential.

Sadly, he ultimately went wrong in every considerable way and all in all, he's arguably the worst Bond villain EVER.