20 Most Hated Characters In TV History
5. Game Of Thrones - Joffrey Baratheon
And then there’s a case to be made that Wil Wheaton had it easy. After all, Wesley Crusher wasn’t supposed to be hated… whereas Game Of Thrones’ Joffrey Baratheon is a psychotic little b*stard, the boy prince turned tyrannical, Caligula-style king.
Aged a few years over the younger version in George R.R. Martin’s original novels, the difference between the Joffrey of A Song Of Ice And Fire and the Joffrey of Game Of Thrones is more than just height and shoe size. Book-Joffrey is a kid who still listens to his mother, who’s right on the cusp of the more disturbing sexual sadism of TV-Joffrey when he’s murdered at his wedding.
TV-Joffrey is, according to the mores of the kind of society portrayed in the show, pretty much an adult. He isn’t constrained by his mother any more than he is by his conscience, and represents a true monster, not just one in the making: were he not a king, he’d be stalking the nighttime streets of King’s Landing as a lascivious serial killer.
Fortunately, Jack Gleeson, the young actor entrusted with the responsibility of bringing this malevolent product of incest to HBO screens in 2011, was better prepared for the kind of attention his portrayal would bring: he’s had no truck whatsoever with the fame machinery that’s surrounded him since he was sixteen or so, and since Joffrey’s death in season four, he’s quite unostentatiously retired from acting.
It’s also true that when a character is so gloriously over-the-top, so ridiculously eeeevil, people tend not to associate the actor with the character quite so much. It’s almost like Joffrey haters - which includes pretty much everyone to ever watch an episode of Game Of Thrones - assume that Gleeson’s in on the joke with them, whereas those furious Star Trek geeks of three decades ago seem to have thought that the joke was on them, and that Wheaton was one of the ones laughing.
Regardless, Joffrey - prostitute-murdering tormentor of the Stark family - remains one of the most loathed characters in any form or genre, on-screen or off.