Entertainment
Top 10 Sexy Female Movie Villains
Hollywood knows how to sell a movie. If you put a good looking dude or a hot chick in the lead role and put them front and center in all the posters and trailers for a movie, then you’ve got a hit on your hands. For some, that’s enough. Other producers have gone the extra mile and realized that hey, if you want a truly successful movie, then cast a good looking dude or a hot chick as the villain, too! Now, we’re really cooking. That movie’s a monster hit. Here are the 10 sexiest female villains in movie history.
10. O-Ren Ishii
Kill Bill is a movie (yes, it’s only one movie – it may have been released in two parts to maximize the commercial potential, but according to its writer and director Quentin Tarantino and every cinephile on the planet, it is just one, whole, complete movie, okay?) that is mostly made up of villains. There is one protagonist, the Bride, who has been beaten senseless and left for dead by the assassination squad that she used to roll with, and aside from her, everyone else in the movie is a villain that she is out to kill as part of her revenge scheme. One such villain is O-Ren Ishii, who is known as the “queen of the Tokyo underworld.” She is played by Lucy Liu and is one of the only characters that actually seems to present any kind of real threat to the Bride. In the end, she has the top of her head lopped off in the snow. It could be argued that O-Ren gets an unfair amount of backstory when compared to the rest of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, but that’s just because she is the most interesting one of the bunch (and, thanks to the fact she’s played by Lucy Liu, the sexiest).
9. Theodora/Wicked Witch of the West
As a prequel movie and an origin story, Oz the Great and Powerful opens up a lot of questions when it begins and slowly answers them over the course of the plot. We are introduced to three female characters – Glinda, Evanora, and Theodora – all of whom are framed as a potential Wicked Witch of the West. They start framing each other as the witch, which confuses Oscar, but in the end, Mila Kunis turned out to be the evil character. Her skin turned green and she got very angry and cackly – but she was still hot as hell. Any role that the beautiful Mila Kunis plays is going to be the sexiest one of something. She has played the sexiest terrifying ballerina, the sexiest bad mom, the sexiest girlfriend of a guy who owns a talking teddy bear, the sexiest voice actress of an ugly character – you get the picture. Kunis ended up winning the MTV Movie Award for Best Villain for her performance as the Wicked Witch of the West. The original Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 movie was not very sexy at all, but don’t worry, you can rest assured that the Mila Kunis one definitely, definitely is.
8. Terminatrix
When the Terminators appear in our present day from the future, a bright ball of energy appears, kicking up papers and tumbleweeds, and then fades away, leaving behind a naked time traveler. If that time traveler is Arnold Schwarzenegger or Kyle Reese, then the ladies in the audience have something to enjoy. But let’s be honest, these are movies about killer cyborgs that are full of gunfights and car chases and explosions and Guns ‘n’ Roses – there aren’t many women watching them. These movies were made for dudes. So, it was very exciting when the third movie introduced us to a female Terminator, known as the Terminatrix, or T-X if you’re into the whole brevity thing. The dudes in the audience got to enjoy the sight of a naked Kristanna Loken traveling back in time and defeat John Connor. Loken was clearly committed to the physicality to the role, as she put on 15 pounds of muscle to play the T-X, and she is crazily sexy in the movie. Loken reportedly loved the leather jacket, leather pants, and leather boots that she wore in the movie, so if you’re into leather, that should make her seem a heck of a lot sexier.
7. Dr. Julia Harris
In Horrible Bosses, three friends who are sick of their employers conspire to kill each other’s bosses to cross over all the motives and therefore get away with it scot free (or so they think). In the movie, the three bosses were based on real bosses that screenwriter Michael Markowitz had put up with over the years. The Kevin Spacey character was a composite of a few bosses, because if he had made it too specific, Markowitz might’ve ended up on the business end of a lawsuit, but the Jennifer Aniston character was based on one specific boss that he had who “was very sexually aggressive with everybody.” In the movie, Aniston’s character sexually harasses Charlie Day, which his friends don’t see as too much of a bad thing. The only problem with the real boss that Markowitz had who was like this was that “she looked more like Cruella De Vil. It was like flirting with a cobweb. So, I decided for the sake of the movie, let’s go with Jennifer Aniston.” So, ironically, the creation of a character who would end up becoming one of the sexiest characters to ever hit the silver screen began with the real woman who was not sexy at all. It’s fun how these things work out.
6. Regina George
Lindsay Lohan originally did not audition to play Cady in Mean Girls. She auditioned for the role of Regina George, the horrible, backhanded villain. While it seems like a natural fit to cast Lohan as the ultimate ‘mean girl’ now that we’ve seen what she’s like in her personal life, the sweet, kind-hearted, polite, innocent Rachel McAdams is actually the perfect choice, because you don’t expect her to turn out to be such an asshole. That’s the genius of the character – and the casting. McAdams has since spoken about the impact that Regina George has had on her career, and how she has to reckon with being immortalized in this role and being best known for it, when she’s done so much more dramatic work since then. She said, “Does Regina George haunt me every day? She does have that quality. No, I have to thank Regina George for giving me some longevity. I’m forever grateful to Tina Fey [who wrote the movie] and Mark Waters [who directed it]. I remember when I read it, I called my agent right away and said, ‘I will play any part in this, please, please, please.’” It is a really great movie, to be fair.
5. Harley Quinn
2016’s Suicide Squad, which gave a bunch of DC supervillains center stage, was not very well received by critics, who considered to be rushed to meet the DCEU quota for the year, full of forced exposition and world building, super confusing, and all round terrible. But still, it did manage to gross more than $745 million at the worldwide box office. How did that happen? Well, it probably had something to do with Margot Robbie’s red hot Harley Quinn. Robbie described Quinn’s relationship with the Joker as the focus of the movie, and said that she is “mad about him – like, literally, mad. She’s crazy. But she loves him. And it’s a really unhealthy, dysfunctional relationship. But an addictive one.” According to Barney Stinson’s theory, the crazier a girl is, the hotter she has to be. Well, Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn is super duper wacko crazy, but she is equally hot! And let’s not forget her performance, which was a spot on interpretation of the comics, included a flawless Brooklyn accent, and was one of the few things in the movie that was actually good and worth watching. But still, she is really hot. She’s one of the hottest movie villains ever. It’s awesome.
4. Rose Armitage
Get Out was absolutely adored by critics and audiences alike. It was a horror movie, and yet it was also a smart study of the current sociopolitical climate surrounding race. And it was also a huge hit at the box office. Those three things don’t usually go together, but trust Jordan Peele to throw them into the mixing pot and make the magic happen. He made a plethora of smart decisions with that movie to make it the resounding success that it was. For example, he changed his original bleak ending to a happier one – the point about police brutality still gets across, because we expect it to happen, and that makes us reflect on ourselves and the society we live in. The happier ending is better, because we want Chris to succeed. We get that satisfaction. These are the kinds of decisions that won Peele his Oscar. Another smart decision that he made was casting Alison Williams in the sinister role of Rose Armitage, because she’s a classic case of looking like the innocent flower, but being the serpent under it. Williams explained her casting: “Jordan told me that he had always pictured me as Rose because Peter Pan or Marnie would make it easier for people to trust me. I was looking for a role that would weaponize everything that people take for granted about me. So, I instantly signed on to it.”
3. Hela
Thor: Ragnarok was praised by critics for many things. It was hailed as the best movie in the trilogy of Thor’s solo movies, which was mainly attributed to how its sense of humor made it the most entertaining of the bunch. The other two – particularly the second one – were much more dull and solemn and serious and it was just a drag. One of the other best received parts of the third movie was Cate Blanchett’s performance as Hela, the older sister of Thor and the Norse goddess of death. In the comics, Hela is not Thor’s sister, but she was made so in the movie, according to one of the screenwriters, so that her character would become “the thing that [represents] what it is to rule Asgard, [Thor’s] family, what he’s been told, what he hasn’t been told.” Blanchett worked with stuntwoman Zoë Bell and Chris Hemsworth’s personal trainer Luke Zocchi to get into shape to play Hela. That, paired with her seductive smokey eye makeup and the inherent attractiveness of her massive amount of power, makes her one of the sexiest female villains in any movie in recent memory. She’s certainly a lot hotter than Thanos or Supreme Leader Snoke.
2. Catherine Tramell
Sharon Stone’s murderous character in Basic Instinct and its less successful sequel is one of the most iconic movie villains of all time. She has been described by one critic as “a mix between the classic femme fatale and the new psycho killers, one of the most evil characters ever created, on Hannibal Lecter’s level.” She was included on Entertainment Weekly’s list of the 100 Greatest Characters of the Last 20 Years. And yet, she is not just a psychopathic villain. She is also remembered in the annals of cinema history as a sex symbol. Well, Sharon Stone is and Catherine Tramell is her most iconic role who also flashes her entire vagina on camera, so Catherine Tramell is basically a sex symbol in and of herself. She seduces her victims and gets them into bed, where she stabs them to death with an ice pick. It’s a very specific modus operandi, but that’s what she does. Let’s not judge. The movie itself, which went on to gross a whopping $350 million at the worldwide box office, has been described as “a neo noir masterpiece that plays with, and transgresses, the narrative rules of film noir.” Most of its commercial success, though, can be attributed to Sharon Stone’s sex appeal.
1. Amy Dunne
Gillian Flynn has been back in the news recently, as her debut novel Sharp Objects has been adapted for the small screen by HBO. But her best selling work is still Gone Girl, and the most popular adaptation of one of her books is still the David Fincher movie adaptation of Gone Girl, which made an unprecedentedly huge amount of money at the box office. It made over $369 million at the global box office, despite being a tremendously dark thriller that was over two and a half hours long. Who saw that coming? This success can be at least partly attributed to Rosamund Pike, whose unsettling and chilling performance as the villainous Amy Dunne (who, like many of the characters on this list, looks like the innocent flower, but is the serpent under it) keeps you on the edge of your seat from start to finish. As well as being an interesting character, she’s a really sexy character. Sure, she mutilated her own genitals with a wine bottle in order to frame an innocent man for rape, but she’s also really hot. In fact, she stands out for being an evil character who uses her hotness to her advantage to trick men into destroying their own lives.