10 Movie Characters Everyone Thought Were Secret Villains

Sean Bean has made a highly respectable career out of playing duplicitous a**holes, so why would he be anything less in 2006's Hitchcockian thriller Flightplan?

Bean plays Marcus Rich, the captain of the flight on which our protagonist, Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster), believes her daughter has been kidnapped.

The audience is led to believe that Rich is gaslighting Kyle because he's either part of the kidnapping plot or the outright ringleader. But in the end, it turns out that the real villain is air marshal Gene Carson (Peter Sarsgaard), who is attempting to hijack the plane and frame Kyle for it.

Ultimately Captain Rich was nothing more than a reasonably skeptical person who saw the facts presented to him and quite understandably assumed it was far more likely that Kyle was suffering from a mental health crisis than the victim of a frame-job.

Rich even offers an earnest apology to Kyle at film's end and lives to fly another day - another rarity for Bean's characters.

Following Flightplan's release, the filmmakers revealed that they intentionally cast Bean in the role to take advantage of his typecasting as a villain and mislead audiences into believing he was a secret villain. Brilliant.