10 Movie Villains You Wish Got More Screen Time

Power-hungry Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) may be the big villain of Gladiator (2000), but when it came to taking on Maximus (Russell Crowe) face to face, there was no better bad guy than undefeated warrior Tigris of Gaul, played by stuntman and bodybuilder Sven-Ole Thorsen.

The true joy of Tigris is that he's not only a major obstacle Maximus must face, but a deep and almost understandable brute. He lives to fight. He loves it and he's good at it. Called back into the fight after his retirement to take down Maximus once and for all, all the former warrior can do is say yes and do what he's done all his life.

The fight itself is an epic and violent spectacle, complete with ravenous tigers and an audience begging to see some bloody combat. In the end, Maximus wounds Tigris and is order by Commodus to put the retired fighter down.

In refusing, Tigris looks genuinely relived, and whilst the whole sequence lets the audience know just how good and moral Maximus is, Tigris disappears for the rest of the movie.

It would have been nice to see the big guy stick around, especially since he was such a famed warrior and proved a worthy adversary to our hero. After all, a little backstory and characterisation never hurt anyone.