This Halloween season, sociopaths are all the rage in pop culture.
In his new thriller, “Law Abiding Citizen,” actor Gerard Butler plays a man who turns against the justice system when the killer of his wife and daughter gets off with a sweet plea deal.
A scene in which Butler’s character, Clyde Shelton, gets his pound of flesh – and then some – from the murderer scared even the 39-year-old actor.
“When I was shooting it, I was very much in it and really believing my character,” Butler said.
“So I felt kind of justified in everything that I was doing because you worked yourself into a kind of fervor about what has gone wrong in your life and the injustices that you’ve been dealt.
“Then when you go to the movies and watch it, which I did, I was freaked out by a lot of what I did and how cold and calculating I could be,” Butler said.
A spree of psychopaths has been rampaging across screens big and small of late.
On Showtime’s “Dexter” this season, the title serial-killer-turned-vigilante, played by Michael C. Hall, finds himself facing another maniac, played by John Lithgow.
The sixth installment of the highest-grossing horror franchise of all time – “Saw” – opens Friday.
That means actor Tobin Bell is back to reprise the role of Jigsaw, a killer who didn’t let his own death get in the way of leaving elaborate traps for his victims. His message: Appreciate life … or die.
In real life, the 67-year-old New York native reserves his mania for his beloved Yankees. But Bell can’t help but feel a close connection to the murderous mastermind he plays.
“It’s not any more difficult to play a criminal than it is to play a saint,” Bell said. “They don’t view themselves as bad people, they view themselves as misrepresented or deprived.
“You always have to take your own character’s side. If you don’t do that, you end up with one dimension of a character,” Bell added.
In general, audiences may enjoy rooting for a hero, but they also love to watch a good villain, said Leonard Maltin, movie historian and critic for the TV show “Entertainment Tonight.”
“Bruce Willis is great in the original ‘Die Hard,’ but if he didn’t have Allan Richman playing the villain, it wouldn’t have been half as good,” Maltin said.
“Compare it to a tennis match: The better one player is the better his opponent has to be to keep up with him.”
And the Academy Awards show crime does pay: Oscars have honored the killer performances of Anthony Hopkins (1991′s “The Silence of the Lambs”), Kathy Bates (1990′s “Misery”) and the late Heath Ledger (last year’s “The Dark Knight”).
Butler said that researching a role can be hellish. He studied with criminal profilers to get into the right mind frame for the cat-and-mouse thriller against the beleaguered prosecutor played by Jamie Foxx in “Law Abiding Citizen.”
But it still didn’t prepare him for the result.
“[Watching] scenes where I’m present and completing these horrors … I literally had my head in my hands going, ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God! That’s awful,’” he said.
(source)
