10 Movie Characters More Important Than You Think
5. Donnie Greco - Saw
The first Saw pays so much attention to the fact that Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith) is the only known survivor of Jigsaw's (Tobin Bell) traps that it's easy to gloss over how she got to that point.
Amanda's trap requires her to cut open a supposedly dead man in the room with her in order to retrieve a key which will unlock the reverse bear trap attached to her head.
Amanda obviously succeeds, but this man's importance in the grand scheme of the Saw franchise is largely forgotten.
This ill-fated man, who goes by the name Donnie Greco - and is played by franchise producer Oren Koules - is not only sacrificed for Amanda's survival, but without his demise Amanda wouldn't live on to become Jigsaw's first apprentice.
That is to say, a deathly ill Jigsaw wouldn't have had anyone to help him during the events of Saw II, and it's decidedly less likely that his legacy would've continued beyond this.
Also, Donnie is the character who perhaps most blatantly exposes the hypocrisy of Jigsaw's "ethos," given that he's incapacitated by Jigsaw with an opiate overdose and seemingly given no chance to escape his own trap.
Unless of course, we assume that Donnie had already previously failed a Jigsaw trap and this was his fatal "punishment" for failure.
Either way, Donnie is a foundational character of the series and yet one who doesn't get discussed nearly enough in the fandom.