Bruce Dern
Bruce Dern wasn’t even technically a villain anymore when he did The Cowboys in 1972. After a dozen years spent abusing Barbara Stanwyck on The Big Valley, lynching Clint Eastwood in Hang ’em High, and getting plugged by Kirk Douglas in The War Wagon, he was officially a leading man—top-billed for the first time, in a big science fiction movie, Silent Running.
Then his agent told him he absolutely had to get two days off the following week, to play a small but important role—the guy who kills John Wayne.
“The very first day I got there,” Dern remembers, “John Wayne came up to me and said, ‘I want you to do yourself and me a favor. Around the set, I want you to kick my ass in front of these little kids, so they’re absolutely terrified of you, so that after I’m killed, they’re scared to death of you as a person.’ He gave me the license to do that, to pick on him.”
Dern was brilliant as the insecure bully, eager to push around small children, and killing Wayne’s character would be the revenge of a thousand slights. And Wayne knew it and knew how the public would react. Dern recalls, “He’d never been shot, except I think in Liberty Valance. He said to me, ‘Ooh, are they going to hate you for this!’ I said, ‘Maybe, but in Berkeley, I’m a hero.’ He laughed and he put his hand on my shoulder and in front of 90 people in the crew he said, ‘That’s why this guy is in my movie because he understands that bad guys can be funny.’”
Bruce Dern has continued to move between sympathetic and nasty characters, has twice been nominated for Oscars, and is still very much a working actor: he was in seven movies in 2023.