Lord Of The Rings & Hobbit: 12 BIGGEST Mistakes We Have To Live With

Yikes.

Now we come to the most awful character in the whole franchise: Alfrid (Ryan Gage), a greedy and unpleasant official in the town of Esgaroth who serves as a comic relief character in The Desolation of Smaug and The Battle of the Five Armies.

A comic-relief character so excruciatingly annoying that he's almost harrowing to watch, Alfrid is never, ever funny in any form and every single scene he was in was worse-off because of his presence. Perhaps most insultingly of all, he often seemed to have more screen-time in The Battle of the Five Armies than the actual main characters did!

In particular, that scene where Alfrid dresses up as a woman to avoid having to fight in the battle and is then told by Bard (Luke Evans) that his slip is showing is beyond cringe-worthy. It's not necessarily the fault of actor Ryan Gage, as this character was so badly-written he was impossible to salvage, but nonetheless Alfrid was one of the worst characters in any recent blockbuster.

And just when you think it couldn't get any worse... a death scene for him was filmed, but it was cut from the theatrical version.

WHY.