The Coen Brothers 10 Most Evil Characters Ranked

The Coen Brothers’ 10 Most Evil Characters, Ranked

The Coen Brothers are known for their dark humor, and for creating memorable cinematic villains in movies like No Country for Old Men and True Grit.

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The Coen brothers are among the most respected and critically acclaimed filmmakers working today. Over the course of their impressive decades-long career, they have brought all kinds of well-rounded, well-acted, memorable characters to life on the big screen, from meek everymen like Larry Gopnik and Jerry Lundegaard to out-and-out weirdos like Jesus Quintana and Gale Snoats.

They’ve also created a ton of iconic villains — or, in some cases, they’ve adapted them from previous source material — who have chilled audiences to the core with their evil nature. So, here are the 10 most evil characters from Coen brothers movies, ranked.

10 Harry Pfarrer (Burn After Reading)

Compared to the acts committed by some of the other villains in the Coens’ filmography, like beheading and woodchipper-based corpse disposal, adultery seems a little tame. But cheating on your spouse is still a pretty awful thing to do, and that’s how George Clooney’s Burn After Reading character Harry Pfarrer spends his days.

Tilda Swinton’s character Katie Cox is also engaged in an extramarital affair — with Harry, no less — but she’s only seeing him, and she’s looking for an opportunity to file for divorce. Harry, on the other hand, wants to stay with his wife, yet he’s constantly on the lookout for more hook-ups.

9 Jesus Quintana (The Big Lebowski)

Having collaborated with John Turturro a number of times, the Coens trusted the actor to come up with his own ideas for his character, Jesus Quintana, in The Big Lebowski. In fact, Turturro ended up directing himself in a spin-off centered around the character, The Jesus Rolls.

Jesus is a sex offender who spent six months in prison for exposing himself to an eight-year-old child. According to Walter Sobchak, he’s a “pederast.”

8 Tom Chaney (True Grit)

Tom Chaney is the man who murdered Mattie Ross’ father in the Coens’ 2010 remake of True Grit. Having previously played a protagonist for the Coens in No Country for Old Men, Josh Brolin slipped deftly into the role of a cold-hearted, soft-spoken killer.

Mattie goes in search of Chaney with U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn, who later gives up, and Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, who was already on Chaney’s tail for his killing of a State Senator. Chaney is one of many members of the Coens’ rogues gallery who can kill without remorse.

7 Leonard Smalls (Raising Arizona)

Early in Raising Arizona, H.I. has a vision in which he foresees the arrival of a biker who would herald the apocalypse. In reality, this biker is Leonard Smalls, a bounty hunter out to take back the baby that H.I. and his wife Ed kidnapped.

On paper, it sounds like Smalls is the good guy, but H.I. and Ed just want to give the baby a loving home because they can’t conceive or adopt themselves. And Smalls’ methods are far from noble. There’s a reason H.I. got a premonition of him as a demon. Fortunately, H.I. is able to blow him up in the movie’s climactic sequence.

6 Gaear Grimsrud (Fargo)

Played by Peter Stormare, Gaear Grimsrud is the partner-in-crime of Carl Showalter. Even after Carl gets shot in the ear doing the hand-off alone in their kidnapping plot, and all he asks for is the car, Gaear promptly murders his pal with an ax.

When Marge finally finds Gaear, he’s casually feeding his dead friend into a woodchipper. Stormare played Gaear’s psychotic nature with emotionless eyes and an unnervingly blasé style of line delivery.

5 Tom Reagan (Miller’s Crossing)

There are no “good guys” in Miller’s Crossing, the Coens’ gangster neo-noir cult classic. The character who is supposedly the protagonist, Tom Reagan, is actually more villainous and evil than most of the supporting players around him.

Tom only commits two acts of violence throughout the whole movie, but he can be held indirectly responsible for the deaths of every other character besides Rug.

4 The Impresario (The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs)

In the “Meal Ticket” segment of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Liam Neeson plays a grizzled, unnamed impresario who takes his young artist, who has no arms or legs, around the country to deliver beautiful performances of Shakespearean sonnets and Biblical passages.

When he finds a chicken that can do math, the impresario tosses his artist into a river to drown. This is, without a doubt, one of the most callous, heinous, evil acts committed by a character in a Coen brothers movie.

3 Lorren Visser (Blood Simple)

The Coens’ feature directorial debut was Blood Simple, a neo-noir masterpiece that put a fresh spin on familiar genre tropes. M. Emmet Walsh shined the brightest out of the film’s cast, playing the role of cold-hearted private eye Lorren Visser.

At every twist and turn, Visser does something unsettlingly unpredictable. His laughing fit in the final scene, as Abby is horrified to discover that the man she’s fatally wounded isn’t actually her husband, is a haunting note on which to end the movie.

2 Charlie Meadows (Barton Fink)

The Coens specifically wrote the role of Charlie Meadows for John Goodman because he has a warm and trustworthy presence. Charlie is the title character’s neighboring hotel guest in Barton Fink. The audience would be lulled into thinking that Charlie was the nice, mild-mannered man he claimed to be, and as a result, the twist would be much more effective.

Midway through the movie, Charlie is shockingly revealed to be a serial killer named Karl “Madman” Mundt, who likes to behead his victims. And the movie’s final moments suggest that he could be the Devil.

1 Anton Chigurh (No Country For Old Men)

Javier Bardem’s villainous character from the Coens’ masterful neo-western No Country for Old Men is a professional hitman without a conscience or, really, any feelings at all. He’s an unstoppable force of pure evil. On multiple occasions, we see him taking people’s lives with absolutely no emotional response; just a cold, callous look in his eyes.

Bardem really sold Chigurh’s psychopathy, earning himself a shelf-load of awards, including an Oscar. The character is just as reprehensible in print form in Cormac McCarthy’s source novel, but Bardem breathed disturbing life into the role on the screen.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/coen-brothers-most-evil-characters-ranked-no-country-old-men/

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