10 Incredible 2017 Movie Characters
6. Johnny Wilcox - Okja
There's a lot of really strange performances in Bong Joon-Ho's science fiction vegan parable. Tilda Swinton plays the twin owners of a meat company, Paul Dano plays a tree-hugging radical, and Giancarlo Esposito plays Swinton's stony faced number two. But the most insane performance in the film comes from Jake Gyllenhaal as TV Zoologist Johnny Wilcox.
Johnny Wilcox is the kind of character that could only exist in a movie like Okja. Halfway between a supervillain and a caricature of American TV personalities, Gyllenhaal's performance was one of the most manic things on screen this year. And yet somehow it worked. His offbeat presence was both funny and terrifying at different points in the film, somehow perfectly matching the bizarre tone of this dystopian Netflix movie.
Rarely do you see actors step as much outside of their comfort zone as Gyllenhaal does in this film. Okja is a very multifaceted film - a heartfelt tale of a girl and her pet pig, a science fiction film about the meat industry, a farce about corporate incompetence - and it is Johnny Wilcox's presence that improbably manages to tie this disparate parts of the movie together with one wacky and off-putting character.