10 Actors Who Were Miscast As The Villain

While just about every brilliant actor playing dress-up for a living in the industry today would likely jump at the chance to stretch their creative muscles and broaden their horizons with a new acting challenge unlike anything they've attempted before, sometimes said attempts to play against type or simply try something new just don't work out as one would have hoped.

And in the case of these otherwise often sensational and consistently gripping thespians, opting to head down the more villainous route on these occasions didn't quite lead to widespread acclaim or a bold new chapter being forged in their already respected careers.

In fairness to the majority of the following names, it wasn't through lack of trying, though.

But all of the moustache twiddling and softly spoken words of menace in the world couldn't save the following big-screen stars from feeling as though they'd been dumped into a role they simply weren't meant to occupy; as seen in the responses from a number of fans in this rather intriguing Reddit post!

From long-time big-screen heroes failing to truly convince as a twisted spouse, to those regular cinematic powerhouses who couldn't quite get it right within the super-sphere, these are those actors who just weren't built to be bad.

Establishing himself as one of Hollywood's most reliable character performers from the '90s onwards, there was a time when the announcement of Johnny Depp stepping into the Wizarding World as one of the most wretched wand-wavers the universe had ever seen would've been met with a sea of undoubted excitement.

By the time the Captain Jack Sparrow thespian signed on the Fantastic Beasts line in 2016, though, the star's real-life controversies and drama had begun to detract from his increasingly hit-and-miss outings on the big-screen.

And on top of attracting the wrong sort of attention and headlines in the time since donning the pale wig of Gellert Grindelwald, Johnny Depp's actual performance in the role during The Crimes of Grindelwald only made matters even more uncomfortable.

Going full pantomime with his latest attempt at producing a larger-than-life creation, Depp's anything but terrifying monologues in his bids to create a new Wizarding World Order and almost literal moustache-twiddling didn't exactly set a high bar for Mads Mikkelsen in the follow-up.

In fact, Mikkelsen did so well upon being recast as the one-time lover of Dumbledore that many critics were quick to question why he wasn't cast as Gellert in the first place.