Fans of awful cinema have been eating well for the past 25 years. If legendarily bad movies can be considered achievements, then there have been some truly titanic triumphs since 2001. Of course, bad characters are pretty much a requirement for a film to be awful—and over the last quarter of a century, there have even been several terrible characters from movies that are actually not all that bad.
Whatever the case, these terrible characters are perfect examples of lackluster writing, terrible acting, and bad directing, disservices to their respective movies in every way that counts. Whether they’re boring, annoying, inconsistent, poorly written or all of those things (and more) at once, the entries on this list are undeniably terrible characters from head to toe, masterclasses in how not to engage an audience.
10
Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) – The ‘Twilight’ Saga
It is an objective fact that Kristen Stewart is an immensely talented actress, but her breakout role in the Twilight Saga was quite a rough start for her career as a leading lady. From the page itself, Bella Swan has the charm and personality of a rock, and no matter how gifted a thespian Stewart is, even she couldn’t possibly make the character work.
No matter how one ranks the Twilight movies, they all have something in common, and it’s an entirely dull and uninteresting protagonist. Bella has no depth or agency, and typically feels like a self-absorbed extension of Robert Pattinson‘s Edward (who’s not much better himself in the role of the sparkling vampire). The Twilight saga has lots of strengths, but a well-written and well-performed protagonist isn’t one of them.
9
Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) – ‘Emilia Pérez’ (2024)
From the 2024-25 awards season to the present, it feels like most people have forgotten all about Emilia Pérez, and that’s probably for the better. This obnoxiously racist, transphobic, and misogynistic excuse for a musical has virtually no redeeming qualities, and that lack of redeeming qualities includes an atrocious protagonist that doesn’t deserve to be played by an actress as good as Zoe Saldaña.
Rita Mora Castro, a struggling attorney who helps a Mexican cartel leader fake her death in order to carry out a gender transition, has motivations and a code of ethics that flip-flop around with no rhyme or reason, depending on what the plot demands. She’s a character as unlikable as she is inconsistent, and not even Saldaña’s decent (though not Oscar-worthy) performance is able to elevate her out of that dark pit of badness.
8
General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) – The ‘Star Wars’ Sequel Trilogy (2015-2019)
Star Wars may be the biggest and most popular science fiction media franchise in history, but that doesn’t mean it’s exempt from mistakes—and many fans would make the argument that Disney’s entire sequel trilogy is one such mistake. That may or may not be true, but something hard to deny is that the trilogy features one of the worst Star Wars characters ever: General Hux.
Domhnall Gleeson does all he possibly can with what little he’s given to work with, but the material is so atrocious that his acting abilities can only take Hux so far. The character is cartoonishly evil to the point of occasional unintentional comedy in The Force Awakens. The Last Jedi then makes him as laughably pathetic as possible before The Rise of Skywalker completely butchers his personality and motivations. Ultimately, Hux is a terrible character and the perfect representation of how the trilogy’s lack of direction affected everything.
7
Balem Abrasax (Eddie Redmayne) – ‘Jupiter Ascending’ (2015)
The Wachowski sisters‘ Jupiter Ascending is actually not nearly as bad as many make it sound, but it’s certainly not as great as the rest of their sci-fi work, either. It’s a perfectly “not that bad” movie with some redeeming qualities that not enough people talk about. That said, the antagonist, played by Eddie Redmayne, is most definitely not one of those redeeming qualities.
Balem Abrasax is one of the worst-written movie characters played by great actors. Redmayne is actually one of the few performers in history who have been nominated for an Oscar (for The Danish Girl) and a Razzie in the same year. The character’s campy, over-the-top demeanor usually makes no sense and doesn’t fit the tone of the movie whatsoever, and he never really poses a credible enough threat for the story’s heroes.
6
Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) – ‘Passengers’ (2016)
A man on a spaceship traveling to a distant planet wakes up 90 years too early due to a malfunction in his sleeping pod. He falls in love with a woman and decides to wake her up as well. That may sound like the premise of a horror movie, or perhaps a tense psychological thriller. Indeed, with that kind of focus, Sony would have had a really solid film on their hands. Instead, Passengers is a romance-drama through and through, with one of the worst-ever movie heroes at its core.
Passengers never gives Jim his comeuppance, instead rewarding his behavior with a star-crossed romance that one can’t help but cringe at.
Jim Preston is a horrifying, gaslighting, manipulative sociopath to whom the film never gives his comeuppance, instead rewarding his behavior with a star-crossed romance that one can’t help but cringe at. To make matters worse, Chris Pratt‘s performance certainly doesn’t help make him come across as less creepy. Jim was doomed from the moment the pen was put to paper on the screenplay.
5
Evan Hansen (Ben Platt) – ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ (2021)
No matter how many similarities they share, theater and cinema are two vastly different mediums. For instance, you can cast a full-grown adult as a teen for a Broadway musical and make it work, but cast a 27-year-old Ben Platt as the 17-year-old title character in Dear Evan Hansen, and you’ve got one of the creepiest-looking musical film protagonists of all time. This adaptation of the Broadway smash hit has myriad problems working against it, but its main character is easily the biggest.
Aside from Platt being ancient for the role in every sense imaginable, Evan is just not a well-written character. He’s a selfish, lying, manipulative menace to society who used his crush’s dead brother as a way to get close to her, and consistently dodged every opportunity thrown his way to set the record straight and make things right. It never feels like the movie makes him suffer consequences equal to his actions, single-handedly making this one of the worst Oscar-bait movies of the last 25 years.
4
Maurice Pitka (Mike Myers) – ‘The Love Guru’ (2008)
Most of the time, actors—particularly comedic ones—can get away with releasing a few flops without losing the public’s good graces. Sometimes, though, comedies so painfully atrocious are released that they kill their star’s career altogether. That’s precisely what happened to Mike Myers when he starred in The Love Guru. Since its 2008 release, the actor has never again been the top-tier Hollywood leading man that he used to be.
The Love Guru is the kind of film that’s awful from the get-go, and that’s mainly because its protagonist is so insufferable. Painfully unfunny and built entirely with racist stereotypes laid upon other racist stereotypes, Maurice is a cringe-worthy caricature that never gets even the slightest bit more tolerable. To make things worse, this infuriating character is Myers at his absolute worst, making the titular Love Guru a bottom-of-the-barrel comedic character through and through.
3
Dylan (Neil Breen) – ‘Fateful Findings’ (2013)
The modern king of terrible cinema is arguably Neil Breen, and there is perhaps no Breen film more iconic or infamous than Fateful Findings. It’s one of the most essential so-bad-they’re-good movies ever made, a nonsensical sci-fi thriller that’s all anyone needs to watch in order to understand why people say that Neil Breen is such a master at making awful cinema.
Fateful Findings may not be Breen’s worst outing overall, but protagonist Dylan (played by Breen himself) sure is the worst character in his filmography. There’s no internal logic to the character, as his motivations reset from scene to scene, and his dialogue feels like it was written by an alien. He’s a protagonist who makes so little rational or emotional sense that he’s impossible to take seriously.
2
Johnny (Tommy Wiseau) – ‘The Room’ (2003)
Speaking of movies that feel like they were written by aliens, no one who watches The Room would be blamed for thinking that the movie was made during writer-director-star-producer Tommy Wiseau‘s very first day on Earth. It’s probably the most notorious so-bad-it’s-good movie ever made, and hilarious though it may be (which is precisely why it has become one of the 21st century’s biggest cult classics), it’s still one of the worst movies of all time.
The movie’s protagonist is Johnny, a character who makes absolutely no sense and is hilarious because of it. The way he speaks, behaves, and makes decisions feels almost non-human, and though that makes him drop quotable line after quotable line, it’s not because he’s well-written at all. Johnny has no stable personality, no consistent inner life, and no apparent understanding of the laws of cause-and-effect. He’s a delight to watch in action, but only because he’s such a terrible character.
1
Jill Sadelstein — ‘Jack and Jill’ (2011)
Adam Sandler playing a woman seems like a scary enough prospect, but Adam Sandler playing a woman with a grating personality and an ear-piercing voice? It’s the stuff that nightmares are made of, and those nightmares come true in Jack and Jill, one of the worst comedy movies not just of the 21st century, but arguably of all time.
There are inoffensive movies that just happen to be poorly made, but then there are aggressively awful films that rub their mean-spirited badness in your face every chance they get. Jack and Jill easily falls into that latter category, and that’s primarily due to Jill’s mere existence. The character is the word “annoying” made flesh, played by Sandler at his most obnoxious and written like the script wanted the audience to hate her with every fiber of their being. Jack and Jill could have very well been a Sandler guilty pleasure were it not for the fact that it features the worst movie character of the last 25 years.
