The most powerful tool at an actor’s disposal is their face, so there’s something to be said about delivering a memorable performance while wearing a mask or with their face otherwise obscured. Even if the mask is totally bitchin’, there’s a serious risk of making a character dull (literally any version of Cyclops) or flat-out ridiculous (the eternal lesson of Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin). It’s hard to imagine Tom Hanks having the same impact as Forrest Gump had be been forced to do the entire film with a jack o’ lantern on his head, although I’d like to believe he would’ve won an additional Oscar for the effort. That said, we’ve seen some truly incredible masked characters over the years that rival any number of their nude-faced counterparts. In honor of the 15th anniversary of V for Vendetta, I’ve ranked 9 of the best performances in which you never see the character’s face, including that rascal V himself.
9. Immorten Joe
Immorten Joe, the bleached rapist serving as the primary villain of the 2015 masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road, makes a heck of an impression. He’s a cross between Darth Vader and an evangelical preacher, leading his band of war boys across the wasteland like a proselytizing Mario Kart character in a chase to recapture his escaped “brides.” Joe is the embodiment of writer/director George Miller’s brand of mad, gleeful chaos, a character so bombastically over-the-top that he would be absurd if he weren’t so strikingly severe in tone and presence. An iconic villain if there ever was one, Immorten Joe is a grotesque action figure you can’t stop looking at but would never want to actually own. And yes, I realize we do technically see his face as it sails through the air after getting ripped off of his fucking skull, but I still feel like Hugh Keays-Byrne’s entertainingly demonic performance needed to be included.
8. Rorschach
Okay, major caveat here – we see Rorschach’s face several times in Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, including a pivotal emotional scene that concludes both the character’s arc and his screen time in the film. But so much of Jackie Earle Haley’s standout performance as Rorschach was concealed behind a mask that I felt like it deserved to be included. Snyder’s adaptation of Alan Moore’s iconic graphic novel was imperfect in many ways, but arguably its greatest achievement was the casting of Haley as the deranged superhero investigating the murder of one of his former colleagues. Haley is an intense actor (look no further than his Oscar-nominated performance in Little Children), and he inhabits the character’s eroded soul with quiet, acidic ferocity. He screams every line of dialogue into the abyss without ever raising his voice. Haley is not a big man (canonically, neither is Rorschach), but he manages to project a truly massive presence in every scene, even with his face hidden behind an undulating swirl of ink blots and his hands firmly in his pockets. It’s a remarkable performance, and one that doesn’t get talked about enough in the superhero movie discourse.
7. Darth Vader
Obviously the most iconic movie villain of all time deserves to be on this list. Although we do briefly see Darth Vader’s sad Mr. Potato Head face at the very end of Return of the Jedi, he spends the majority of the trilogy hidden behind a dope-ass mask speaking with the even doper-ass voice of James Earl Jones. And although his weird insectoid mask was used to sell a ton of merchandise, Darth Vader remains a ferociously intimidating presence, thanks to Jones’ voice and David Prowse’s physicality. The dude fills every room he’s in, and not just because he’s wearing an incredible cape.
6. Kane Hodder as Jason Vorhees
Many actors have worn the hockey mask, but nobody inhabited Jason Vorhees more completely than Kane Hodder. Hodder played Jason in four Friday the 13th films (Parts 7 through 10, the most of any actor to date), and he did a great deal to transform what is essentially a prop into a fully-realized character. Previously, there hadn’t been any consistency to Jason beyond moving from kill to kill like a frenzied shark (with the exception of a few notably wacky moments in the tongue-in-cheek franchise entry Jason Lives). Hodder managed to add a little bit of depth to the undead murderer by introducing subtle mannerisms and intent to Jason’s movements, giving the character an unexpected amount of personality. You can almost hear Jason’s thought process when Hodder is behind the wheel, particularly in moments where he’s doing a quick Bourne-esque scan of the scenery for makeshift murder weapons or winding up to punch a man’s head from his shoulders like he’s trying to kick a field goal with his fist. Weirdly, Hodder’s biggest contribution is simply the way his Jason stands, shoulders wide and chest heaving like a perpetual engine of angry violence. It’s the definitive version of the character, and the one Friday the 13th fans love the best.
5. The Mandalorian
Ok, I promise this list won’t be dominated by Star Wars characters, but in my defense they have the coolest masks. And the dude with arguably the coolest mask is Din Djarin a.k.a. the Mandalorian. The Mandalorian armor is so radical that it turned a generation of science fiction fans into lifetime Boba Fett enthusiasts, even though the character only speaks four lines of dialogue in the entire Star Wars trilogy and is onscreen for a total of about six minutes. Pedro Pascal’s Mando eclipses that by being the main character of a whole dang television series, which incidentally is the best live-action Star Wars story to come out since Return of the Jedi. Pascal’s vocal performance drives the character, managing to establish the most memed paternal relationship in recent history as he Lone Wolf and Cubs his way across the galaxy with the feloniously adorable Baby Yoda. And he’s an interesting figure in his own right, creating an alluring mystique very intentionally reminiscent of Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name. Never take that helmet off, you glorious spaceman.
4. V (V for Vendetta)
One of Hugo Weaving’s most entertaining attributes is his wild-ass voice. His endlessly imitable performance as Agent Smith in The Matrix introduced mainstream audiences to his singularly odd manner of speech, especially his deliberate, clipped precision in the phrase, “Mr. Anderson.” Weaving’s role as the faceless anarchist V in V for Vendetta is primarily a vocal performance, so he goes buck wild to make sure his voice is the backbone of the character. It truly doesn’t matter that you never see V’s face, because I could listen to his ridiculously theatrical voice for hours. I desperately want Weaving to start a secondary career narrating audiobooks as V. Overly self-indulgent voices can easily be grating or ludicrous, but V’s flowery vocabulary, penchant for word games, and bizarre good humor blend perfectly to create a vivid character. Weaving could’ve easily gone way over the top (without mincing words, V is dressed like an insufferable asshole), but his relative restraint was clearly the right choice.
3. The Killer in Black Christmas
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Black Christmas.]
The 1974 horror film Black Christmas is iconic for a number of reasons – it was arguably the first slasher movie, it introduced several elements that have since become staples in the genre, and it might be the only horror film in history to never conclusively divulge the identity of the killer. The most we ever see of him are disquieting close-ups of his intense, wild eyes, hungrily blazing out of the darkness at his victims. And even though he torments the women of a sorority house with continuous obscene phone calls, his voice is barely audible, and he’s weaving a frightening tapestry of incoherent mania. The finale leaves us with the possibility that he’s been identified and killed, but the haunting final shot of his undiscovered lair in the sorority house’s attic (including the unfound bodies of two of his victims) means we’ll never know for certain. He’s effectively a phantom – we never see his face, we never clearly hear his voice, and we never know his motivation beyond murder for murder’s sake. He’s one of the most frightening villains in the history of the genre, and all we ever are his eyes.
2. Dredd
The sheer majesty of Karl Urban’s perpetual frown in 2012’s Dredd is the stuff of folklore and legend. Expertly cast as the lantern-jawed fascist enforcer set loose in a post-apocalyptic cesspool of violent crime, Urban scowls and growls his way through one of the greatest comic book adaptations ever made. Judge Dredd is a ridiculous character, and Urban clearly has a ton of fun inhabiting his over-the-top severity and cold adherence to duty. But he also manages to imbue Dredd with small doses of humanity, even while embracing the pulp elements at the character’s core. Urban drives the film like an engine of measured chaos, moving effortlessly between benevolently sparing the lives of two dumb kids caught up in gang violence and blowing a man’s head completely the fuck up with his futuristic handgun. It culminates in the all-time flex of grabbing the chief antagonist in the middle of her supervillain monologue and chucking her out a goddamn skyscraper, stopping to growl “Yeah” as she falls a mile to the ground below. I lay awake at night wrestling with the anguish over never getting the fifteen sequels to this film that we deserved.
1. Bane
Where. To. Even. Begin. Tom Hardy gave the world a gift in the summer of 2012 with The Dark Knight Rises, in which he decided to have iconic Batman villain Bane speak with the voice of a British strongman from the 19th century. The timeline of human history was instantly divided into before and after this moment. I could waste a few words discussing how Hardy’s intimidating physicality was expertly utilized to craft Bane’s relentless menace, but I respect you all too much to pay anything more than brief lip service to that distraction. The Bane voice is, without hyperbole, the greatest cinematic achievement of this or any generation. What other piece of artistic expression has brought a purer joy to more people than Tom Hardy inexplicably channeling the ghost of a Dickensian moneylender while massacring Batman’s ass like the Ultimate Warrior midway through a werewolf transformation? It’s been 8 years and the cultural impact of the Bane voice has not diminished one iota. Like all of us, I intend to pass it on to my children, and to my children’s children. And while I recognize that technically you do see Bane’s face for a few brief moments in a flashback, my response to that is, “Shut up.” Don’t try to block Bane’s shine, he was born in the darkness. There was no way I could physically construct this list without including him and his glorious voice. His entry simply appeared as soon as I finished typing the headline, and I was unable to delete it nor move it from the #1 position. Bane works in mysterious ways, most of them involving fists and explosions.