8 Fictional Movie Villains Inspired By Real People

by Danny Meegan

1. Jabba The Hutt (Return Of The Jedi) - Sydney Greenstreet

Jabba Sydney Greenstreet
Lucasfilm/Warner Bros.

George Lucas was influenced by a dozen different things when creating Star Wars, including Flash Gordon and The Wizard Of Oz, and when the time came to design Return Of The Jedi, he turned to several classic black-and-white films of the 1940s to help him create intergalactic gangster Jabba The Hutt.

Jabba - an underworld crime boss, a hulking, ruthless businessman who deals in abhorrent practices like slavery - was based on famed actor Sydney Greenstreet. Greenstreet was known for playing Jabba-like criminal characters in films like Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, and this scheming, crime-boss archetype was exactly what Lucas wanted his Jabba to be.

Lucas instructed his design team to create something "alien and grotesque… just like Sydney Greenstreet", and the character they came up with was basically the space version of the obese criminal Greensteet was commonly cast as.

Star Wars fans will remember that Jabba was originally a human in the unaltered edition of A New Hope, but this was mostly due to financial restrictions impacting Lucas' vision of the character.

The classic, slug-like Jabba that we all know (and hate) is the definitive version, and Sydney Greenstreet is to thank for helping bring him to life.

Know of any other villains who took cues from real people? Let us know in the comments section!

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!