8 Terrifying Villains You Didn't Realise Were Played By Great Directors

4. Martin Scorsese - Taxi Driver

Nowadays, the image most people have of Martin Scorsese is of a cuddly cinematic elder statesman, who, when he isn't making startling movies that a director half his age would have trouble getting their head around, is usually off somewhere lovingly trying to restore a classic film so that the rest of the world gets to keep watching it long after he's gone. He's nice like that. It's not easy to immediately recognise this Martin Scorsese in the fiendish passenger sat in the back of Travis Bickle's (Robert De Niro) cab halfway through Scorsese's own Taxi Driver. The story goes that the actor who was originally meant to play the part pulled out at the last minute, forcing Scorsese to step in and take the role himself; the actor's loss, though, is everyone else's gain. With that thick black beard, those glazed eyes and that menacing grin, Scorsese here looks like the devil himself. Fidgeting like a cokehead and babbling casually about how he's going to shoot his cheating wife's vagina with a .44 Magnum, Scorsese manages to do the impossible in this scene, and make De Niro's lunatic army vet Bickle look relatively normal by comparison.