4. Ian McKellen as Magneto in the ‘X-Men’ films (2000), (2003), (2006), (2014)
Perhaps the recipient of the most compelling back story of anyone on this list, Magneto is fascinating partly because he is easily read through another lens as a hero striving to avert a mutant genocide, having already lost his family to The Holocaust. This richness of history, and the complex, political nature of much of Magneto’s motivation, requires an actor of considerable depth to convey, and luckily, Bryan Singer netted never-less-than-brilliant Shakespearean actor Ian McKellen for the role. Opposite Patrick Stewart’s Dr. X (and seriously, is there anything more adorable than the real-life romance between these two guys?) the pair take the intellectual arguments and thorny confrontations that by rights should be the bits of the film where the teenaged audience is all, like, “ugh, two old guys talking,” and makes them among the most gripping sequences, especially for fans of subtext and those of us who dig an intelligent effort to knit a fictional universe into our own real one. McKellen’s Magneto can be cunning and ruthless, but he is, paradoxically for a mutant, one of the most human of villains, the most sympathetic and comprehensible, and the one who most clearly demonstrates that the path to hell can truly be paved with the best of intentions. It’s a coup for the reboot franchise to have got an actor as good as Michael Fassbender for the role this time around, but we have to say that the fact that we’ll see McKellen’s defining version of his character passing the baton is one of the things that most has us looking forward to ‘Days of Future Past.’
3. Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor in “Superman” (1978) and “Superman II” (1980) (not “Superman IV”)
How much we truly admire Hackman’s portrayal of Superman’s self-dubbed nemesis, and how much we love it out of sheer nostalgia for our our younger selves for whom “Superman” films were without qualification the Greatest Films Ever Made, proved too difficult a question to parse, so we stopped trying. Hackman is a scenery-chewing, comically exasperated, why-I-oughtta type of villain, but in the bright, bold world of Superman, with its clear virtues and ludicrous plots for World Domination (or simply continental — one of our favorite moments in ‘II’ is when Zod asks Luthor what he wants in return for delivering Superman, and Luthor replies “Australia”) that makes him the perfect Lex. Even to the children watching, there’s an ambivalence to Hackman’s portrayal (that we never really got with Kevin Spacey’s more sinister, Machievellian riff) because half the time, while we know he’s the bad guy, and is Doing Bad Stuff, he seems to be having way more fun (balloon escape!) than any of the good guys. Props of course have to go to his retinue of Ned Beatty as Otis (“Mr Luthor! Mr Luthor!”) and Valerie Perrine as Miss Tessmacher, who up the comedy quotient even further, but the tone of these first two films, loopy but with real stakes, is arguably best embodied by Luthor, the result of taking an actor as usually restrained and controlled as Gene Hackman, and letting him off the leash.
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