20 Recent Movie Villains Who Were Instantly Iconic

The villain at the core of Brady Corbert's towering epic The Brutalist is Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), the wealthy industrialist who hires architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) to design a community center, The Van Buren Institute.

But amid the film's enormous scope, we see Harrison as an agent of capitalism who uses his riches as a means to control László, a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor who immigrated to the United States in the pursuit of a better life.

The longer the story drags on, the further Van Buren's mask slips, his snobbery transpiring into outright racism, all while his acts become more literally, physically monstrous.

It'd be easy for a character such as Van Buren to come across as a basic Evil Rich Guy, but across the film's expansive 215-minute runtime, we get a far more nuanced account of the man's character, all of it wrought so brilliantly by an Oscar-nominated Guy Pearce.