10 Actors Who Perfectly Played Both Heroes And Villains

3. Sir Ian McKellen - Lord Of The Rings & X-Men

Thanks to his performance as Gandalf, the image of cinematic wizards is completely owned by Sir Ian McKellen. Harry Potter fans may balk at that grumpily, but there's a reason he was offered a lucrative contract to replace Richard Harris as Dumbledore when he died, too.

He IS Gandalf, an old beatnik-like figure swathed in robes and suspicious-smelling smoke, with a hippie edge that defies the skilled warrior beneath it. He's a mentor, wise and morally unbendable - though he isn't entirely infallible - and he is one of JR Tolkien's pillars of moral purity (along with the hobbits, Legolas and Aragorn), entirely convincingly.

It's stunning to see how well he inverts that image in the X-Men franchise at the same time, twisting the image of a man of principles into a Holocaust survivor intent on dangerous retribution. McKellen's Magneto is a thespian powerhouse, whose presence on screen is no less towering when he's next to his fellow mutants than when he was in the company of dwarves and hobbits in Middle Earth.