4. Michael Fassbender 300
Erik Lehnsherr is a serious, cultured bloke. As at home playing chess as he is slapping the bejeezus out of you with metal objects, there's a definite intellectual quality to him. After all, not any old man can wear a turtleneck without looking slightly insane it takes an amount of sartorial and cerebral sophistication to pull such a thing off, so when Fassbender's Magneto dons one to perfection in X-Men First Class, you know you're dealing with a serious bloke, and Irish accent aside, the actor 'got' the master of magnetism to a tee. Yet if we rewind back six years, you'll note that Fassbender also took on the role of Stelios in 300, who you might recognise as the friend of the bloke who gets decapitated, and the guy who leaps over Leonidas and murderises a Persian general come the film's finale. While ostensibly not a bad performance, the amazingly hammy role is as far away from Magneto's cold intellectualism as it is possible to get. So really, why weren't we mad about his casting? Of course, the reason why Is that Fassbender had played plenty of serious roles in between 300 and First Class, thus softening the blow. but if we're going by Affleck-logic, the very fact that he once donned leather speedos and twirled a sword at various foreigners should have somehow put him out of the running to play a younger Ian McKellen, Critically-acclaimed roles like Hunger be damned, it's the homoerotic blood-and-thunder that really stick in our minds when it came to this casting. Of course, I'm being sarcastic, but I'm doing it to make a point.