11 Safe Good Guy Actors Who Should Have Played More Villains
2. Robin Williams
Went Bad In... Insomnia, One Hour Photo Between bouts of voicing colourful animated characters, and gooning around on screen without so much of a hint of restraint, Robin Williams committed arguably his two greatest performances to film in the space of just one big year - 2002. He may have been incredibly good in Good Will Hunting, The Fisher King and Good Morning Vietnam, but it is the extreme amplification of those characters' more complex sides that work so well in Insomnia and particularly One Hour Photo. All three of those named roles relied on Williams' disarming status as an oddity, fractured and wounded beneath the surface, and oddly, the introduction of psychosis to his range of on-screen characeristics added a strangely satsifying context to the pantomime mugging of other unlinked roles. In both films, Williams is deeply creepy, and utterly convincing as the villain, without having to rely on the jarring sensation that usually comes with perennial "hero actors" turning villain, and watching them back, it is almost criminal that the actor was not given further chances to explore that sort of content, particularly under Christopher Nolan's stewardship. Some might have laughed at the suggestion that Williams could play a villain for Nolan's Batman, and they would probably now given the type of films that the furry actor has deferred to making, but in the context of Insomnia and One Hour Photo, the casting would have been incredibly good.
Went Bad In... Insomnia, One Hour Photo Between bouts of voicing colourful animated characters, and gooning around on screen without so much of a hint of restraint, Robin Williams committed arguably his two greatest performances to film in the space of just one big year - 2002. He may have been incredibly good in Good Will Hunting, The Fisher King and Good Morning Vietnam, but it is the extreme amplification of those characters' more complex sides that work so well in Insomnia and particularly One Hour Photo. All three of those named roles relied on Williams' disarming status as an oddity, fractured and wounded beneath the surface, and oddly, the introduction of psychosis to his range of on-screen characeristics added a strangely satsifying context to the pantomime mugging of other unlinked roles. In both films, Williams is deeply creepy, and utterly convincing as the villain, without having to rely on the jarring sensation that usually comes with perennial "hero actors" turning villain, and watching them back, it is almost criminal that the actor was not given further chances to explore that sort of content, particularly under Christopher Nolan's stewardship. Some might have laughed at the suggestion that Williams could play a villain for Nolan's Batman, and they would probably now given the type of films that the furry actor has deferred to making, but in the context of Insomnia and One Hour Photo, the casting would have been incredibly good.