Screenwriting : Despicable Characters by Cheryl Allen

This is hard to answer because all my villains have their reasons, their pain. My current villain wants revenge for her sister's death. I never create mindless thugs as villains and antagonists. They have to be the hero of their own story.

I think a despicable character needs to be relatable. Whom do we loathe more than ourselves? To answer your question, my most despicable character might be a protagonist who takes advantage of vulnerable people around him in the name of the greater good. He is indeed fighting the good fight, but never met a problem he could not kill his way out of.

For me, it’s about the character they were before they became despicable. There has to be a backstory, even if we don’t see it on the page/screen. I think some of the best, most despicable characters still have a humanity. I think it’s what makes them even more terrifying. Hannibal Lecter wasn’t entirely wicked. He had kind relationships with people. A current character I think proves this is Yvonne Strahovsky’s character in The Handmaid’s Tale. Whatever brings unpredictability is what elevates the character. The tension is increased by not knowing what they’ll do. You know they’ll probably err on the side of evil, but you have hope they won’t. It’s your hope and how the character might crush it that makes a despicable character glorious.

Empathy. It's movies. Audiences fall in love with bad characters, real or fictional.

I wrote a character that was the girlfriend of a drug. She was horrible. She was believable, not likeable or relatable. Just realistic and horrible.

John Grangoff. Kidnapped a lawyer, a soon-to-be father. Killed him because he felt he was a bad lawyer in defense of a case. Drained his body. And yeah.

Or really, Juan-Felipe Fernandez, my Drug Lord of New York City in a script called “California Sunshine” and he killed kids who stole his drug money. Anyone interested in reading lol?

Kay makes a strong point about sitting in judgment. One of the most despicable characters I ever created was based on the real Dynamite Bob Chambliss, who was convicted of blowing up the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. Here's what the Wildsound Feeback Festival said about the screenplay Four Negro Girls In A Church:

This is a wonderfully moving retelling of the story of the 16th Street

Baptist Church bombing of 1963, taking a deep look at some of the

characters involved and giving an almost unsettlingly unbiased account.

The script doesn’t ever lecture the audience in any way about right and

wrong, just provides characters and context and lets them come to their

own conclusions – it’s a subtle difference, but it’s one done incredibly

well and should be respected. As despicable as he may seem, Dynamite Bob

himself is still a well-written character, confident in the morality of his actions yet a

far cry from the standard stereotypical supremacist in that he has a

family, a life, and at infrequent times becomes an ordinary guy.

~Matthew Toffolo

With feedback like that, I know I've done my job as a screenwriter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYuUmnLkQio

Maybe I'm just different, but I love my bad guys, well some lol Some are really messed up. I remember one of my scripts when it was time to kill one off, I sat there like "damn, I'm sorry bro I'm going to miss you. RIP" :(

But the most despicable...Hmmm...There was this one, who was really manipulative. He was the bad guy all along, but he was so smooth with his ways, he had everyone believing he was on their side, until his showed his true colors. I think people could relate to him because there's so many like him among us. Chances are many of us has fallen victim to manipulation by types like him.

The question about the villain is complex.

The character is not mine, but one of the most interesting villains that comes to my mind is John Doe in Se7en. He is using messed up methods to make people see that the society is morally twisted.Yet he is pure evil.

Even Buffalo Bill loved his dog.

Casper, a crooked cop. He manipulates everyone, including the hero. All he cares is getting rich, not upholding the law. He even killed a drug dealer's kid once...:(