The Toughest Movie Characters of All Time

Nobody is badder than The Bride, a stone-cold assassin who tries to get away from it all and live happily ever after before her former boss and colleagues kill her almost-husband and leave her in a coma. When she wakes up, she methodically (and maniacally) works her way through a list of five kills, but along the way in Quentin Tarantino’s two-part saga, the body count gets much, much higher.

You can’t talk about tough without talking about Ellen Ripley. Originally, the role was written for a male hero, but Ridley Scott ultimately changed it to portray a heroine played flawlessly by Sigourney Weaver. From flamethrowers, to powered work loaders, to pulse rifles, Ripley wielded some serious weaponry to survive the onslaught of aliens each film threw at her. Few have reached the legendary status Weaver established as Ripley throughout the course of the Alien franchise.

There isn’t a member of this film series’ Russian or Italian communities in New York who doesn’t know a victim of Keanu Reeves’ John Wick. He might have the highest body count of anyone else on this list. And all because of a puppy. Do not mess with John Wick’s puppy.

The 1987 sci-fi horror thriller gave us Arnold Schwarzenegger as Major Alan “Dutch” Schafer in a wild and terrifying face off against Predator, an alien being who hunts Dutch and his team for nothing more than sport. Predator was the first installment of four existing movies (a fifth flick was announced in November 2020) and showed us how a beefed up human measured up against an equally beefed up monster. Physical power aside, Dutch’s fearlessness and quick smarts—figuring out mud could camouflage his heat signature? Genius!—help him ultimately defeat Predator and make it out alive.

Leonidas set the tone from the very beginning of this gore-filled ultra-violent flick. The leader of the Spartan army never shied away from a fight, and even though his final moments saw him on his knees, it wasn’t to beg for mercy, it was to die as he lived—by the sword, or, in this case, spear. If that wasn’t enough, Leonidas and his men also managed to best all of Xerxes’s forces—which far outnumbered the Spartans—in battle up until the very end.

You could probably populate this list with just Tom Hardy characters. In Legend, he played twin gangsters who tore up London. In Bronson, his take on the titular serial killer was appropriately terrifying. Hell, even Bane in The Dark Knight Rises broke Batman’s back and nearly detonated a nuke in Gotham City.

But Forrest Bondurant, in 2012’s criminally underseen bootlegging thriller Lawless, remains Hardy’s most badass character. Known for being “invincible,” he survives a slit throat and multiple gun shots (as well as a fall through some thin ice), and deals with the perpetrators of crimes against him in 10 times as brutal fashion.

The toughest characters are as morally unyielding as they are physically gifted. For Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, the primary heroine in the 2015 classic, she’ll do anything to protect the women she places in her care, including driving through brutal sandstorms, fighting men twice her size, and most notably, voluntarily becoming one of the most wanted criminals in George Miller’s spectacularly bleak hellscape.

Like Hardy, Denzel Washington is an actor who could own a lot of real estate on a list like this, but none of his characters is as brazenly violent and intimidating as Lucas. In American Gangster, he executes a cheeky Idris Elba on a busy New York street in broad daylight, only to calmly take back his seat at a diner and finish his coffee.

Honorable Mention: Washington as Robert McCall in The Equalizer movies. McCall kicks ass left and right to help protect those who can’t do it for themselves.

Rocky Balboa is tough, but his protege, played by Michael B. Jordan, encompasses everything the word means in spades. He’s cut. He fights like a champion against stronger and faster competition. And he knows what fighting might cost him, yet he gets in the ring anyway.

“Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?”

“No, have you?”

While Jenette Goldstein's character didn’t survive her company’s mission on LV-426 in James Cameron’s epic action-horror sequel, no one can deny that this five-foot-two-inch firecracker slayed her fellow marines with words as well as she did a hostile hive of xenomorphs with her heavy artillery.

Like Tony Soprano or Vito Corleone, Joe Pesci’s ice-cold gangster from Goodfellas proves toughness doesn’t require six-pack abs or 18-inch biceps. Tommy might not beat any of his fellow wise guys in feats of strength or a foot race, but tell the guy he’s funny or forget to bring him his drink, and you might not make it out alive.

He’s more suave and sophisticated than brutish, but you have to be gritty to survive 24 world-saving missions over a half-century in the field, right? The Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan iterations of Bond don’t register much on the toughness scale, but Sean Connery and especially Daniel Craig (who literally laughed, naked, in the face of torturers) more than make up the difference.

Benicio del Toro’s bloodthirsty assassin is out for revenge for the murder of his wife and daughter in this tense 2015 border thriller. He doesn’t ask questions, opting to kill from the shadows first, but if you do happen to get the jump on him (as someone does in the film’s 2018 sequel), make sure you finish the job and that he doesn’t walk away from the encounter with a bullet hole through his cheek. It won’t end well.

Mickey Rourke plays this tough guy with a face that looks like it’s been tenderized like a steak. In Robert Rodriguez’s hyper-stylized noir, he goes after, and brutally kills, a cabal of cannibal priests who are responsible for the death of his prostitute girlfriend. After he confesses to the murders, he’s sentenced to death himself and takes multiple shocks on the electric chair before finally going down for the long goodnight.

Jeff Bridges played Cogburn in the Coen Brothers’ 2010 True Grit remake with classic whiskey-soaked Jeff Bridges wit. But in the original (a film for which John Wayne won his only Oscar), Cogburn is a one-eyed fat man with all the sufficient resolve of a film with this title and not much patience for anyone doing wrong by his charge, Mattie Ross.

Stephen Lang plays the bad guy in James Cameron’s 2009 space war film with relish. He’s a man who looks, talks, and carries himself like he always has a cigar in his mouth. Quaritch takes actual joy in destroying the resources of Pandora, and nobody on any planet can rival him when it comes to operating gigantic robot gunners.

Tom Hanks sort of feels like a surrogate dad whenever he’s on screen, and in Cast Away, he’s playing a FedEx executive—not a profession that makes this list more than once.

But what he does after his plane goes down on a totally deserted island is a portrait of physical and mental toughness. He removes his own diseased tooth, spears fish, engineers a raft for his escape, and most notably, says goodbye to his beloved volleyball, Wilson.

We’re not supposed to talk about this movie, but Brad Pitt’s character is a portrait of anarchy. He’s a guy who loves violence and relishes in it. It’s his art. And while Pitt is famous for eating a lot in most of his movies, he’s as fit as any human has ever been in this one.

There’s nothing harder than going to war, unless you’re volunteering to do so to stop your elderly father from having to serve. That’s Mulan, and while she wouldn’t win a fist fight with some of the others on this list (she’s animated, for one), she’s cunning enough to almost single-handedly destroy her country’s invading enemies.

The Hunger Games is a bloody, horrifying competition in which teenagers murder one another until their numbers are whittled down from 24 to one. In its 75-year history, only one person from District 12 wins this competition … until Katniss shows up and does it twice.

Her weapon of choice is a bow and arrow, and after the Games, she uses it to lead the entire continent in a war against the oppressive Capital and its vindictive President Snow.