10 TV Villains Who Stole The Show
5. Lorne Malvo (Fargo)
Some men are made for villainy, and Billy Bob Thornton is one of them. Stealing a show with a cast as stellar as Fargo’s is no mean feat, but the former Mr Angelina Jolie is on scintillating form in the first season of the crime drama.
Lorne Malvo is an agent of chaos. Sent to Minnesota to carry out a hit, he meets hapless Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman, showing villainous tendencies of his own) and ushers him into darkness for sheer enjoyment. Malvo pulls the strings for almost the full season, gleefully causing carnage and flaunting his ability to evade capture time and again. While he is ostensibly a career criminal, Thornton makes it patently obvious that Malvo would behave in no less dastardly a fashion if he worked for free. He’s utterly unrepentant, but blessed with such charisma that it’s not hard to root for him.
Fargo’s anthology approach means we saw the last of Lorne Malvo after season one. The writers have come up with many great baddies in the following years, but none have been quite so needlessly, cheerfully evil as its first grand antagonist.