Jesse Eisenberg has just been cast as Lex Luthor, and the internet is uncharacteristically not happy. Unthinkable! Idiotic! Totally unlike the real Lex Luthor! Worse than Ben Affleck as Batman, who was more ridiculous than casting teen heartthrob Heath Ledger as the Joker! Et cetera. Well, half the fun of geek culture, it seems, comes before the release of the movie or book or what have you, during the period when geeks can do what geeks do best, and speculate and fantasise and critique and say how they'd do things better. That's the real creative engagement part: the stories themselves are mostly generic and boring road-tested reruns of journeys to find oneself, learn a lesson and then beat up a similarly-powered villain with lots of explosions.
The interesting bit is talking about how to do simple stories, which everyone has as a common denominator, well. Everyone can pitch in on this, and it gives one of the few forums for actually discussing acting with friends. Highbrow Shakespeare and co. tends to be met with a lot of "oh, he was very good, wasn't he", whereas if it's Benedict Cumberbatch doing that funny face he does in Sherlock everyone loves to rave about it or knock it down as hammy or take it to bits in other ways. That's the point of geeking out.
In fact, the Eisenberg story reminded me of a conversation with a friend I had after the most recent episode of Sherlock, also to do with villains. The question was about the apparent return of Moriarty, and what could be be done to top him in the villain stakes. It was agreed that Moriarty's brilliance as a villain came partly from being played by Best Actor In The World Andrew Scott and partly from sheer unpredictability. A villain who cheerfully kills himself just in order to top his opponent in a battle of wits made for one of the greatest moments of TV of all time, and we agreed that to have him return slightly ruins the wtfness of that moment in retrospect. Conversation then turned to introducing a female villain who could go toe to toe intellectually with Sherlock without there being any hint of sexual tension, a route rarely trod by mainstream cinema and TV. I put forward various ideas including having Olivia Colman play a villain, which I admitted was an unusual choice, but given her previous work, I doubt there's anything she's incapable of.
Evil Colman
That's when I realised that there's actually no such thing as the right kind of actor to play a villain. There's only a good character. Take the Eisenberg case. Plenty of online snarking was done about how unthreatening he is, how he would annoy Batman to death, have the superpower of superfast speech. But you don't need to be threatening the whole time to be a good villain. You just need to kill someone. Imagine that in Scene I of the new Batman movie Lex Luthor is basically being played as a Mark Zuckerberg beta male. He's whiny, physically unimpressive, and doesn't even say anything especially ominous. And then, at the slightest provocation, he stabs an underling to death with a pencil. He then goes back to being exactly as he was before.
This, in my mind, is precisely the way to create a good villain, because he functions like Hitchcock's bomb under the table. We already know that the figure is vicious and murderous - that point doesn't need to be made again. Everything they do that plays against that - childlike playfulness in Moriarty's case, or devilish charm in Hans Gruber's - heightens the suspense, because we don't know when the murderous side might return. We find the villain confuses or wrongfoots us, he is complex and unknowable and therefore difficult to predict, and this creates the danger that makes for a good villain.
I say "he" because villains are still almost invariably men. And there's no need for this. In fact, precisely because we are unused to female villains, they are the prime market for villainous expansion right now, as I think we're probably bored with the mischeivous "he wanted to get caught" type (in just the last couple of years and just the stuff I've seen I can group the Joker, Loki, Skyfall's Silva, Moriarty, and Star Trek' Khan into this group). To wrongfoot audiences we need actors like Olivia Colman to play villains with mannerisms we don't recognise, female villains with no sexual undercurrent at all who are just nutcase killers and criminal masterminds. Not that Olivia Colman can't do sexy. She can just do a lot more than sexy.
Look at Ruth Wilson, another actor who can do pretty much anything. She's fantastic as Alice Morgan in Luther (although not really a villain) because she is an utterly unpredictable psychopath with a genuine sense of fun. Some people detected a sexual chemistry between Idris Elba and her in a bout of wishful thinking - I actually thought the lack of it was one of the most refreshing things about the show. She's totally mad, totally her own person. And too few female characters have got the chance to not be defined by gender.
Make her a supervillain with eyebrow powers
A good villain needs that independent, instantly recognisable character to work well. That's why there's no such thing as a good villainous actor - a villain is simply someone who threatens our protagonist in some way. And to do that, they don't need to appear threatening. They just need to, you know, do something threatening. And that's the screenplay's job, not the actor's. Absolutely anyone can play the villain if they shoot the hero's dog in the first five minutes. After that, all bets are off, we know they're an absolutely terrifying threat. It's what the actor can do with everything else apart from being obviously villainous that should interest us.
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