11 Safe Good Guy Actors Who Should Have Played More Villains
7. Jamie Lee Curtis
Went Bad In... Mother's Boys (1994) Like Kristen Scott Thomas' exceptional villainess in Nicholas Winding Refn's dull, provocatively awful Only God Forgives, it took no more than a blonde dye-job and a bit of attitude to turn the paragon of teenage virtue in the Halloween films into a murderous, seductress with an inexplicable backstory, and unfortunately unbelievable actions. Mother's Boys takes some very familiar stalker movie conventions and twists them, predominantly with the heel-turn casting of Curtis as the villain and not the ineivtably helpless prey (which even features a climactic reference to Michael Myers' apparent invincibility) and while the film is pretty bad, what Curtis does with the limited material is enough to convince she should have been offered further dark roles. The writing verges on the ridiculous (including having Curtis' character abandon her family for very little reason, before coming back with a passion for her estranged husband that burns with the fire of a thousand crazy suns) and the plot is about as dumb as they come, but Curtis is spine-tinglingly cold as she attempts to off her husband's new girlfriend, with the help of her brain-washed children. There's something about the combination of her hyper-charged sexuality, and the ice cold contempt that suggest she definitely could have handled more complex, darker roles, but it seems the painful reviews probably put paid to that career change.
Went Bad In... Mother's Boys (1994) Like Kristen Scott Thomas' exceptional villainess in Nicholas Winding Refn's dull, provocatively awful Only God Forgives, it took no more than a blonde dye-job and a bit of attitude to turn the paragon of teenage virtue in the Halloween films into a murderous, seductress with an inexplicable backstory, and unfortunately unbelievable actions. Mother's Boys takes some very familiar stalker movie conventions and twists them, predominantly with the heel-turn casting of Curtis as the villain and not the ineivtably helpless prey (which even features a climactic reference to Michael Myers' apparent invincibility) and while the film is pretty bad, what Curtis does with the limited material is enough to convince she should have been offered further dark roles. The writing verges on the ridiculous (including having Curtis' character abandon her family for very little reason, before coming back with a passion for her estranged husband that burns with the fire of a thousand crazy suns) and the plot is about as dumb as they come, but Curtis is spine-tinglingly cold as she attempts to off her husband's new girlfriend, with the help of her brain-washed children. There's something about the combination of her hyper-charged sexuality, and the ice cold contempt that suggest she definitely could have handled more complex, darker roles, but it seems the painful reviews probably put paid to that career change.