8. Javier Bardem
The moment Javier Bardem was announced to be playing the villain in Skyfall, we all knew it was going to be a match made in Heaven, not only because the actor is enormously talented on a general level, but because he only a few years ago won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for one of cinema's truly iconic bad-guy performances, as Anton Chigurh in The Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men. Mendes smartly kept Bardem's character vague and under wraps even during trailers, holding tight the surprise that was his excellent performance as the psychopathic Raoul Silva. Earning numerous comparisons to Heath Ledger's The Joker, what with his calm brand of madness and amusingly convoluted plan, Bardem's Silva is also a classic Bond villain, with his own hidden deformity - a facial prosthetic filling in a hole in his jaw - and wonderfully over-the-top sense of theatricality. Simply, Bardem delivers one of the best villains in Bond history, braced directly between the expectations of old and new. So strong was his performance that it has already been nominated for Best Supporting Actor by the Broadcast Film Critics Association, the London Film Critics Circle, the Satellite Awards, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Washington D.C. Film Critics. The SAG nod is a particularly good boost, and suggests that he
might be in for an Oscar nomination. Of course, you don't need to know much about the Oscars to know that Best Picture nominations usually go to films that rack up other nods too, so if the film can earn plaudits for its acting, then consider it an even stronger Best Picture contender.