Evil Brit - TV Tropes. Ben Kingsley: Have you ever noticed how, in Hollywood movies, all the villains are played by Brits? A stiff upper lip is key.
The English tend to view this trope in one of three ways, depending on the particular depiction. Either: with a sense of pride (Evil Is Sexy / Evil Is Cool / Evil Is Posh after all!), mild eye- rolling amusement (tsk, Americans) OR annoyance at the apparent national stereotyping.
Unmasking the shills of the new world order is not a terribly difficult task. One of the first and most obvious signs is duplicity in the image they present.
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- We all tend to focus on the evil men in the world and forget some of the truly evil women that have lived. I hope to correct that with this list.
Quite a few of these are not actual Brits, but have anomalous quasi- British (usually vaguely upper- class and English, as noted above) accents in settings where almost everyone else has some sort of American accent and no one is necessarily supposed to be from either country, just to mark that character as villainous. As you might expect, this version appears to be associated with films and shows in which the use of English is (at least weakly implied to be) a Translation Convention for whatever the characters are . See The Queen's Latin and Aliens of London. The first is usually wealthy and snobbish, and probably quite welleducated.
The second is the hooligan with the Cockney (or similar) accent. The Romans, who generally are the baddies in most historical films, are almost always played by English actors. The British also are often the imperial bad guys in Hong Kong kung- fu flicks.
World War II films using the Translation Convention usually have Those Wacky Nazisplayed by Brits as well. Surprisingly, they are quite rare in Irish films. Simplifying wildly, Americans go into movie acting to be rich, famous, and loved by the audience; Brits go into acting because they like acting, and some who do well at it then go to Hollywood for the money. With, on average, more training, more experience, less need to be loved, and a cheerful interest in any well- paying gig, they can often make excellent charismatic villains. Of course, it seems that there are also people in Hollywood with a cultural aversion to Britain who are all too happy to cast them in these parts.
In those, this role is often given to the French, Germans or (rarely, especially nowadays) Americans. A flashback sequence shows how British pirates lied to, manipulated, and conquered the natives of a Pacific island, which the Japanese then set out to liberate. This only applies to him in Part 3, since Part 1 is set in England, meaning everyone else is also British.
The Solar-Cooler is the world’s first Portable, Solar-Powered Refrigeration Cooler. Plug into the sun, and keep your food and drinks cool. Gray Fox, real name Frank Jaeger, was a mercenary and former agent of U.S. Special Forces Unit FOXHOUND. Originally a child soldier, Jaeger was the only operative in.
Interestingly enough, the Big Bad is actually the president of America. Britain IS the villain. However, Luciano Bradley is given a British accent in the English dub. The accent was how the dubbers tried to match his use of polite Japanese Honorifics in the original. The novels based on the series even note that he sounds just like James Mason. Interestingly enough, Khyron was voiced by actor Greg Snegoff who also was the voice of Scott Bernard, a character that sounds nothing like Khyron.
Even more interestingly, the Southern Cross (Robotech Masters) segment had a minor character named Alan Fredericks who was also voiced by Snegoff in a Khyron- like voice. However, Fredericks was more erudite and reserved than Khyron.
Appropriate since Fredericks was a good guy, even if he was a member of the GMP. Strangely, in the dubbed versions of Dragon Ball, despite General Blue's not- so- subtle hints at being of German origin, Blue was given a British accent.
While he was introduced as a sort- of- antagonist and his Destiny HERO monsters were not looking like good guys, he turned out to be an Anti- Hero. His deck references the culture of England, but rather the darker side of it. He used his label as a front to smuggle goods inside his clothing. After being foiled, he later hatched a plot to steal the Queen of Britain's scepter, but was stopped as well. Other than his thick English accent, omnipresent Union Jack tattoo, and a few snippets he told about his life, very little is known about his background, although he is most likely from the city of Manchester, England. He grew up to become a notorious highwayman and robber who terrorized England in the 1.
Although the comics are made in the United Kingdom, Judge Dredd himself is a post- Apocalyptic American. Being voiced by Ian Mc. Shane just makes him more.
Bad Ass. Fox, every single bad guy, literally, has a British accent (except Rat, who has a Cajun accent), while every good guy has an American accent. Word of God says that this film uses a Translation Convention whereby the animals have American accents (so the director could cast his favourite actors) and the humans have English accents (as a nod to the author). It's pure coincidence that all the humans in the story are villains..
Waul, is one of these. Voiced by John Cleese at that. Between the spineless, obnoxious asshole Senator Ron Davis and the polite, smooth- talking Brit Frederic Downing, which do you think ends up being the true villain responsible for the outbreak?
The first guess doesn't count. He also nearly turned down playing Severus Snape in Harry Potter before JK Rowling let him know that there was more to Snape than what met the eye. Evil himself turns out to be British- born because he is Austin's brother. The Dark Knight Saga. Batman Begins has Ra's al Ghul played by Liam Neeson, though he's only sort of an Evil Brit.
Despite being from the United Kingdom, Neeson is Northern Irish, which isn't actually part of the island of Great Britain. As such, he's disqualified on a technicality. Cochrane, complete with irritating Catch Phrase and requisite accent.
Interestingly, he was originally supposed to have a Big Damn Heroes moment during the Storming the Castle scene by coming to Kar and Jade's aid. Possibly, she deliberately cultivated it to hide her Nazi roots.
He was Billy Zane's Battle Butler, Lovejoy, in Titanic (1. Jack the Ripper in Time After Time. The casting got Lampshaded by the director in the DVD extras as an American thing. Unfortunately, he was Too Cool to Live. He also played Admiral Tolwyn in Wing Commander, one of the few higher- ups who have no problems with Blair's ancestry (Tolwyn was in fact close friends with Blair's parents).
Two teen boys who rejected the advice of Starbuck and Apollo ended up becoming evil, and acquiring British accents. Which they lost once they had learned the error of their ways! While almost all the characters are morally suspect, Kevin Kline's character Otto (one of two Americans in the movie) is the biggest scoundrel of them all, while the most (relatively) morally upright character is John Cleese's Archie. The fact that a Brit, the aforementioned John Cleese, wrote the film might have had something to do with it.. Saber did want to take over the world, but in a good way.
The real villain was The Man Behind the Man, who double- crossed Saber into turning every single product made by his company into a weapon. He shows he's evil because he doesn't like baseball.
High School Musical 3: Tiara Gold. See Michael Collins or The Wind That Shakes the Barley for good (well, evil) examples. Merrick played by Sean Bean.
The heroes are always British members of Her Majesty's Secret Service, and the villains most often Continental Europeans, Asians, or even Americans. The exceptions are Golden.
Eye and Tomorrow Never Dies. The director's intention was to poke fun at this trope. He blackmails him into solving the komodo problem on the island. He orders Oates to kill the visitors, and refuses to send a medical pickup when Oates demands one.
Subverts this via Dark Is Not Evil after a Heel Realization and subsequent Heel. Malcolm Rodney is an important agent of the Galaxy organization. He constantly tries to undercut his boss Gila and repeatedly advises killing Derek Flint. He's portrayed as sleazy and completely untrustworthy.
Sure, it's a movie about the American Revolution, but did they really have to make him so utterly cruel and despicable? All have been roundly criticized by historians for their wild inaccuracies, often involving playing up (or outright fabricating) British atrocities and general nastiness.
In a particularly notorious example, The Patriot shows British soldiers burning a group of townsfolk alive in a church, an act actually committed centuries later by the Waffen- SS in France but one century earlier by the English against the Irish in the Confederate War. Finally, it was Australian commanders' idiocy, not British, that was behind the failure at the Nek. Christopher Hitchens has noted that the British people are so often portrayed as incompetent in Gibson's films that he suspects it is a deliberate prejudice. Pirates of the Caribbean.
Revolution (1. 98. Sergeant Major Peasy is British, and definitely a bad guy.
Dark City was one of his few heroic roles, and that was as a Fake American. However, he's so charming and so handsome that the Hot Scoop played by Scarlett Johansson finds this impossible in the end, it is revealed that he was the murderer after all. The less said about the French kid and Hannibal Rising the better. Molina later joked about this in interviews. Molina: If we gave him a British accent, it's a bit like giving it away right from the start. It's a bit like, carrying a great big sign that goes . The casting decision seems straightforwardly this trope until it's revealed that Harrison is actually Khan Noonien Singh - a character with a Sikh name and therefore of south Asian origin, previously played by a Hispanic actor.
Star Wars. Although that was more incidental, since union rules for British films at the time required a minimum number of speaking parts for British actors, so a lot were cast as Imperial officers. Both the Imperials and Rebels were played by mostly British actors but all the Rebels' voices were later dubbed by American actors.
A few sources claim that the upper- class English accent is the default accent on Coruscant; everyone listed below (except C- 3. PO) either grew up or spent large amounts of time living there. Who and the Daleks and Daleks' Invasion Earth: 2. A. D. Obi- Wan (Alec Guinness and Ewan Mc.