11 Reasons You're Wrong About Solo: A Star Wars Story
7. Paul Bettany Is One Of The Better Star Wars Villains
Lucasfilm
Unfortunate though it may be that the talented Michael K. Williams was removed from Solo due to being unavailable for the film's reshoots, replacements don't get much better than Paul Bettany, who plays the part of Dryden Vos with appropriate volatility and nonchalance.
Vos, despite meeting the criteria for the film's big bad, is just another fish in the vast, vast sea that makes up the Galactic Empire. Even he answers to someone else, but while he's just another cog in Crimson Dawn's machine, the character still manages to impart a lasting impression.
Visually, Vos is easily one of the better looking Star Wars bad guys. Costume designers Glyn Dillon and David Crossman deserve credit there (as they do for every character's garbs in the film), painting a picture of a criminal who revels in excess and violence. Bettany himself also manages to convey Vos' explosiveness wonderfully, balancing the character's inherent charisma and charm with the disturbing nonchalance with which he approaches violence.
He might not be the most bombastic bad guy going, but he's a more than competent adversary for Chewie and Han.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
