10 Respected Actors Who Completely Hammed It Up To Play Flamboyant Villains

6. Anthony Hopkins As Hannibal Lecter - Hannibal Movies

He's a stone-cold killer, a cannibal, a renowned psychiatrist, an intellectual and, above all, a lover of the fine arts. Hannibal Lecter has been played to varying degrees of success by four different actors over the years, but none have played it as flamboyantly or arguably as well as Anthony Hopkins, who made Hannibal his own in the movie trio of The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal and Red Dragon. His entrance in Lambs - staring coldly through his jail cell as he tries to scare Jodie Foster's rookie cop into losing her mind - has become the thing of legend, and this classically trained Welsh thesp looks like the textbook definition of evil. Playing Hannibal as a refined, macabre gentleman of culture initially, Hopkins' level of flamboyance escalates as the Hannibal films he's starring in lessen in quality. And though maybe Hopkins has taken more to actorly grandstanding of late, hamming it up in the Thor movies, his career was built on quieter character work in such films as The Elephant Man and The Remains of the Day. Hannibal Lecter, on the other hand, is a man who eats human liver and kills guys then wears their faces as masks so he can slip out of jail.