Curated playlist
Male characters in film
- Company of the RingIn the dark lands of Mordor, nine shadowy figures known as Black Riders or Ringwraiths ride in silence. They are the enemy that demands a counterforce. J.R.R. Tolkien chose exactly nine members for his group to match and oppose these nine…
- Erik SelvigErik Selvig was a professor of Theoretical Astrophysics who grew up hearing stories about Asgard before he ever had reason to believe any of it was real. Born in 1951 in Stockholm, Sweden, he spent his career at Culver University, where…
- Tony Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe)Tony Stark first appeared in 1963. His creators later said they wanted him to be the quintessential capitalist, a character built to go against Marvel's own readership. Stan Lee based the industrialist on Howard Hughes. He called Hughes…
- Scott Lang (Marvel Cinematic Universe)Scott Lang is a fictional character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, portrayed by Paul Rudd across five films between 2015 and 2023. He holds an MIT engineering degree, served time in prison for theft, and arrived at the Avengers through…
- Frodo BagginsFrodo Baggins is a hobbit of the Shire who, on the 22nd of September, shares a birthday with his cousin Bilbo. That shared birthday is one small thread in a web that will eventually bind Frodo to the most consequential object in…
- Sherlock HolmesSherlock Holmes first appeared in print in 1887, tucked inside a Christmas annual called Beeton's, in a novel titled A Study in Scarlet. Nobody could have predicted what would follow. By the 1990s, over 25,000 stage adaptations, films,…
- King ArthurA warrior on the field of Y Gododdin has just slain three hundred enemies, and the poet praising him still cannot offer the highest compliment. "He was no Arthur," the verse concedes. The line is one of the most famous Welsh poetic…
- Pippin TookPeregrin Took is the youngest of the four hobbits who walk out of the Shire and into the greatest war Middle-earth has ever seen. He is the only one among them who has not yet come of age when the journey begins. And yet this impetuous,…
- James Bond (literary character)James Bond, Commander, Royal Naval Reserve, code number 007, was born on the page on the 17th of February 1952. That morning, Ian Fleming sat down at his Goldeneye estate in Oracabessa, Jamaica, and typed out 2,000 words. He was trying to…
- Kylo RenKylo Ren is, in the words of Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw, "gorgeously cruel, spiteful and capricious." He is, Bradshaw added, a Star Wars villain given to "petulant temper tantrums, with his lightsaber drawn." Long before he earned that…
- Qui-Gon JinnQui-Gon Jinn dies in The Phantom Menace, cut down before the story he set in motion has fully begun. His hours on screen are numbered, his arc unresolved. Yet his voice refuses to stay silent. It turns up in animated series, in later…
- Peter Pan (character)Peter Pan, the boy who never grows up, stepped onto a London stage on the 27th of December 1904 at the Duke of York's Theatre, and he has never quite left. Scottish novelist and playwright J. M. Barrie created him, and the question that…
- Merry BrandybuckMeriadoc Brandybuck, the hobbit the world knows simply as Merry, begins The Lord of the Rings as a conspirator. Long before Frodo Baggins set foot on the road, Merry had already learned the secret of the One Ring. He had already recruited…
- Poe DameronPoe Dameron holds, in the words of one British newspaper, the title of "Second Coolest Man in the Galaxy." That single line hints at how quickly viewers connected this pilot to a certain smuggler from an earlier era of the same saga. Yet…
- Finn (Star Wars)Finn first appears in the Star Wars franchise as stormtrooper FN-2187, a First Order soldier without a name of his own. On his first combat assignment, appalled by his unit's cruelty, he abandons his post. He allies with the Resistance…
- Han SoloHan Solo made his first appearance not on screen but on the page, in the novelization of Star Wars published in 1976, a full year before audiences saw him fly the Millennium Falcon in 1977. George Lucas introduced a scoundrel with a…
- Sam Weller (character)Sam Weller is the fictional Cockney bootblack who turned a struggling serialised novel into one of the great publishing phenomena of the nineteenth century. When Dickens first began releasing The Pickwick Papers in monthly parts, sales…
- Lando CalrissianLando Calrissian is a fictitious character in the Star Wars franchise, introduced onscreen in 1980. In a review from that year, Janet Maslin of The New York Times called him "exaggeratedly unctuous, untrustworthy and loaded with jive."…
- Connor MacLeodConnor MacLeod, known to audiences as The Highlander, was born in 1518 in Glenfinnan, Scotland, near the shores of Loch Shiel. He is a fictional immortal swordsman who has spent five centuries losing everyone he loves. The questions that…
- Max RockatanskyMax Rockatansky begins the Mad Max franchise as a quiet, capable highway patrolman who ends it as a ghost haunting the wasteland. He is the antihero at the center of a series of Australian post-apocalyptic films created by director George…
- Flash GordonFlash Gordon first appeared in print on the 7th of January 1934, and within a few years, 50 million people were reading his adventures every week. He was a polo player and Yale graduate dropped into a rocket ship headed for an alien world,…
- Samwise GamgeeSamwise Gamgee is crouching beneath a window at Bag End when the wizard Gandalf discovers him. He has been listening to his employer Frodo Baggins discuss the One Ring in private. Gandalf makes Sam Frodo's first companion on the road out…
- Gimli (Middle-earth)Gimli, son of Glóin, is a fictional Dwarf warrior in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and one of the primary characters in that story. At sixty-two years old, he was considered too young to join his father on the quest to reclaim…
- LegolasLegolas, a Sindar Elf of the Woodland Realm, appears in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings as one of nine companions chosen to carry out the most dangerous mission in Middle-earth. He is the son of Thranduil, King of Northern…