Some actors are born heroes. A chiselled jawline, a pleasant face and a penchant for respectable roles can paint some actors into a heroic corner that makes everything they do seem admirable.
These are the guys you want to be flying the plane when the engine falls off, the people who you ask to fight for you in court, the ones who might make an inspiring speech at your wedding.
Some actors might be naturals at playing heroes, but when they occasionally decide to try something different, they often prove they're even better at being bad. Everyone expects Javier Bardem, Christoph Waltz or Alan Rickman to play the villain, but when Forrest Gump goes bad, anything can happen…
1. Tom Hanks – The Ladykillers (2004)
In 2002, Tom Hanks tried to play a bad guy in The Road To Perdition. He put on a black hat, he shot people and he tried to look mean, but gosh darn it he just couldn't quite pull it off – still playing the one person that everyone was rooting for. Two years later, he tried it again and gave us one of the Coen Brothers' darkest, most surreal, least likeable characters to date.
Hidden under a Colonel Sanders hairstyle and a set of over-sized false teeth, Hanks' Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr is a despicable dandy who spends the whole film trying to kill a sweet old lady. Overshadowed by the bad reviews the film picked up for copying an older, better one, Hanks' performance is one of his most interesting – with no traces of the sweet clichés that defined the rest of his career.
He later reprised the villainy (and in one case, the teeth) in two of his six roles in Cloud Atlas.
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2. Henry Fonda – Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Before Hanks, Hollywood's go-to nice guy was Henry Fonda. Noble in 12 Angry Men, charming in The Lady Eve and inspirational in The Grapes of Wrath, Fonda was America's first great everyman – the guy who gave post-war audiences someone honest and decent to look up to.
In the languorous opening scene of Sergio Leone's epic western, a child is brutally gunned down – and Fonda is revealed as the squinting, steely, killer who goes on to do a lot worse. It's still a vicious film to watch, and Fonda reportedly had a lot of second thoughts about ruining his image with the role. Now rightly regarded as having one of the best introductions in cinema, bad guy Frank is remembered as Fonda's finest.
3. Denzel Washington – Training Day (2002)
Denzel Washington is one of Hollywood's greatest modern actors, but he pretty much always plays the same guy. Whether he's a civil rights activist (Malcolm X), a grumpy train mechanic (Unstoppable), a bookish ex-assassin (The Equalizer) or a middleweight boxing champ (The Hurricane), he's always wise, respectable and selfless.
But one year after he gave stirring speeches to high school kids in Remember the Titans, Washington grew an evil goatee and became the worst cop in cinema history.
Corrupt, bitter and gleefully violent, Alonzo Harris won Washington a well-deserved Oscar – and it arguably marked the best role of his career. It would take another 15 years of playing wise old heroes before he tried shading his morality again in 2016's Fences – a role that won him another armful of awards.
4. Leonardo DiCaprio – Django Unchained (2012)
Leo started off picking complex, interesting roles in the likes of This Boy's Life and What's Eating Gilbert Grape before getting everyone all swoon-y in Titanic and Romeo + Juliet. Picking complex and interesting roles ever since, he's still mostly remembered as a romantic hero.
Proving that he can turn his baby-faced charm into something far nastier if he wants to, DiCaprio's performance as Calvin Candie makes for Tarantino's greatest villain. Far more chilling than Michael Madsen's sadistic Mr Blonde, subtler than Christoph Waltz's Hans Landa and more frighteningly believable than David Carradine's Bill – Candie is a calm, well-mannered monster who embodies the whole horrible history of the American South.
And before you mention The Wolf of Wall Street, he played an anti-hero in that. Not the same thing.
5. Frank Sinatra – Suddenly (1954)
The Harry Styles of his day, Sinatra's winking face was pinned up on the bedroom wall of a million teenage girls around the world. Never mind that he allegedly had several real world ties to the mafia, Ol' Blue Eyes was the nation's sweetheart after star roles in the likes of Anchors Aweigh, On The Town and From Here To Eternity.
Wanting to sully his squeaky-clean image, Sinatra played a psychopathic killer in Suddenly – a messed-up little creep who terrorises a war widow and plans to shoot the president for kicks. When Sinatra's friend President John F Kennedy was assassinated by a real sniper in 1963, Sinatra ordered the film pulled from circulation – making it a lost classic that's now well worth seeking out.
6. Tom Cruise – Collateral (2004)
The ultimate all-American hero, Tom Cruise built a reputation as the quintessential action movie star. From Top Gun and Mission: Impossible to Minority Report and Jack Reacher, Cruise makes a living jumping out of planes (and on to chat show sofas) with a big grin on his face.
To his credit, he's often looked for ways to mix up his image with more conflicted roles, and he even dabbled with villainy in 1994's Interview With The Vampire, but playing a sexy, troubled vampire hardly counts as going against the grain.
But in Michael Mann's Collateral, Cruise showed a cold, cruel side as a hit man that no one was rooting for – a striking example of how good he can be when he's not throwing himself off buildings.
7. Steve Carell – Foxcatcher (2014)
Looking like Mr Burns in a tracksuit, Foxcatcher's John du Pont is a tour de force for Steve Carell. So pathetically loveable as Michael Scott in The Office, and so hilariously goofy as Brick in Anchorman, the soft edge of pathos that he usually leans into was buried under a much more tortured, tragic soul (and one hell of a false nose).
A very odd millionaire who befriended two Olympic wrestlers before shooting one of them point blank, Carell's Du Pont is presented with huge compassion and empathy for the real man – but it's a performance that also never feels afraid to show his sinister side. Carell would go bad again, of course, to voice Gru in three Despicable Me movies, but that doesn't exactly count…
8. Robin Williams – One Hour Photo (2002)
The most frightening villains are the ones who look the most harmless. After a lifetime of playing everyone's favourite cartoon genie, cross-dressing nanny, board game escapee and absent-minded professor, Robin Williams swapped family comedies for family photographs as Seymour Parrish – a lonely technician who becomes unhealthily obsessed with a bunch of children.
Greyed-out and glassy-eyed, his rubbery grin suddenly looked terrifying – and the man who once made a silverback gorilla cry vanished into one of cinema's most frightening studies of obsession and loneliness.
Williams would go bad again the same year in Insomnia, but he was never quite as chilling as he was the first time we saw him weeping into a grubby stack of stolen Polaroids.
9. Kevin Costner – Mr Brooks (2007)
The cinematic equivalent of Bruce Springsteen, Kevin Costner is the kind of double-denim-clad regular Joe who looks like he might buy everyone a beer on his birthday. An everyday hero in Field of Dreams, a western hero in Dances with Wolves and a folk hero in Robin Hood, Costner wore plenty of white hats in the '90s before deciding to go bad in Mr Brooks – quite possibly as a way of papering over The Postman.
Overlooked at the time (partly because the plot was so similar to Dexter), Costner's turn as a loveable family man who just happens to be a serial killer is one of his best – and few could have pulled off both sides of the character quite so effectively.
10. Harrison Ford – What Lies Beneath (2000)
Robert Zemeckis' horror works so well because it plays straight into the image of Harrison Ford. One of the few modern movie stars who can sell a film with his face, as soon as he walks on screen the audience sees Han Solo, Indiana Jones and the President from Air Force One.
Playing half the film as a befuddled nice guy who everyone trusts, Ford (spoiler alert!) flips in the third act and suddenly becomes a cheating, stabbing, murdering mad man. The vengeful ghost of a dead co-ed might get the film's big scares, but it's Ford's take on Dr Norman Spencer who lingers longest – proving that he can turn Indy into a monster at the drop of a fedora if he really wants to.
11. Ronald Reagan – The Killers (1964)
Donald Trump might be the first reality TV star turned President, but Ronald Reagan was the first celebrity in the White House – leaving behind a respectable Hollywood career to enter politics full time in the late '60s.
Chiselled and clean-cut alongside Humphrey Bogart in Dark Victory, Errol Flynn in Santa Fe Trail and a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo, Reagan gained a reputation as B-movie icon – the perfect face to splash on a glossy poster.
Reagan's film career wasn't a particularly great one, but his final role proved that he had a knack for playing vicious, menacing murderers – taking on unrepentant hit man Jack Browning in the best screen role of his career.
Reportedly hating the film, Reagan left Hollywood and became a vicious, menacing politician instead – doing his best to distance himself from The Killers during his campaign and making sure no one found any theatrical prints for years to come. He should have been a lot more embarrassed about Bedtime for Bonzo…
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