The measure of your hero is often the quality of your villain. The better you write your villains, the more your readers will like and believe your story, and the more they will like and believe your hero. So, how do you write compelling villains?
I asked author and screenwriter Brian Godawa. He’s an award-winning screenwriter. His first feature film was To End All Wars. He is also the best-selling author of the Chronicles of the Nephilim series and a new series, Chronicles of the Watchers.
What is a villain?
Brian: Traditionally, as authors and writers, we call the villain the antagonist. In basic storytelling, the villain is the external antagonist to the protagonist. Most good stories have a hero driven by a strong desire. That desire creates narrative momentum, because we want to know what happens next. But every hero also has an internal flaw or internal antagonist, something lacking in their character or worldview that the story forces them to confront.
The villain is the external foe who tries to keep the hero from achieving that goal. So good stories have a circular setup, with a hero who wants something, an inner flaw that keeps them from getting it, and an outer enemy who also keeps them from getting it. The clash among these elements creates the drama that makes us want to turn the page.
Thomas: I want to push back on that a little, because the villain is not always the antagonist. A good example is the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. George Bailey wants to see the world, build big buildings, and do great things. But who keeps stopping him? His brother and his family. His brother gets married, gets a good job, goes off to war, and wins a medal. The villain, Mr. Potter, is actually trying to give George what he wants. At one point, he says, “George, I’ll give you forty thousand dollars a year. You can take your wife to Europe. Wouldn’t that be good?”
Potter is offering George exactly what he wants, and yet he’s not the antagonist. He is the villain, and the ending is satisfying even though he never gets his comeuppance. He’s forgotten in the story because he ultimately doesn’t matter. He’s not the antagonist, not the protagonist, and not the relationship character.
Brian: Good point. There are always ways to subdivide these roles and bring more complexity into stories. That example is totally viable.
Thomas: Writers can play with having an antagonist who isn’t morally evil. Which raises another question.
Do villains need to be evil?
Brian: I wouldn’t say so. As you pointed out, the antagonist isn’t always evil. Take Good Will Hunting. You have three men who challenge one another, and their antagonism helps the hero grow. An antagonist can be someone who pushes the hero to be better. Often, that person is actually an ally who wants the same thing but sees the world differently.
As for It’s a Wonderful Life, I would argue Potter does not want what’s good for George Bailey. Potter wants to control the town. He wants power. In that sense, he is a classic villain. Sometimes those categories overlap, and sometimes they don’t.
Do villains need to be likable?
Thomas: Do our villains need to be likable? We don’t want them to be so repulsive that readers want to skip their scenes.
Brian: The more realistic and human you make your villains, the better they are. Even though they clash with the hero, and even though we love a clearly evil character because it gives us a strong moral contrast, exaggerating their evil can make them less believable and less interesting.
If you give your villain a believable premise, one that makes sense if you grant their assumptions, readers will find them more compelling. For example, in many stories, a villain may believe humanity is destroying the earth, so eliminating people becomes, in their mind, a moral duty. It is evil, but within their worldview it is logical, and people like that do exist.
The first step in writing a good villain is to remember that no villain thinks they are a villain. Every villain has a moral justification. As a writer, you must understand their logic.
Let me give an example. In my latest novel, Jezebel, I retell the biblical story of the most infamous queen in history. Some readers might expect a “witchy woman” caricature. But I wanted her to be believable.
She comes from Tyre, a wealthy, cosmopolitan, sea-trading culture. It was like New York or Los Angeles, rich and sophisticated. When she marries Ahab and enters Israel, she sees a poorer, more rural nation. She comes in thinking, “I feel sorry for these people. They don’t have culture. I’m going to help them. I’m going to bring them refinement.”
From her perspective, she wants to improve Israel. The problem is that her worldview is thoroughly pagan. She believes in gods Israel is forbidden to worship. She thinks Baal worship is beneficial because Baal is a strong god. If you accept her premise, she is doing good.
When you read Jezebel, or any story with a well-crafted villain, you’ll find they don’t look evil at first. It’s only as their logic plays out that you see where it leads. That gradual revelation can make a villain both believable and chilling.
How does crafting realistic villains help readers recognize real-world evil?
Thomas: Another advantage of crafting villains this way is that it helps readers better identify evil in the real world. Real villains are not twirling their mustaches and laughing in a sinister way. As you said, they see themselves as heroes trying to make the world a better place. They are the heroes of their own story.
The path to hell is paved with good intentions. The essence of the Gospel is that good intentions cannot save the world. They cannot even save you. Good intentions ultimately condemn you. You need Christ. He is the only way to salvation.
It is important to show villains as human rather than as caricatures. Even comic books often have deeper, more complex villains than people give them credit for. A good example is Batman v. Superman or Captain America: Civil War, where two heroes see the other as the villain.
Batman sees Superman as the villain. Superman sees Batman as the villain. In the same way, Iron Man and Captain America become antagonists to each other. Each sees the world differently. Iron Man believes, “We need to be kept in check.” Captain America believes, “If someone tells us not to act when we need to act to save the world, then we are doing the wrong thing.”
You know you have found the right balance when your readers take sides. But in Christian fiction, you do not want readers taking sides with the villain. By the end, they need to agree that Jezebel was the villain. You do not want a pro-Jezebel faction developing after the book is over.
How do you guide readers toward recognizing the true villain?
Brian: The key principle is consistency within a worldview. There is a lot of flexibility in storytelling, and nothing is absolute, but consistency matters.
For example, the Joker in The Dark Knight is an extreme villain, yet he works because he is consistent. He embodies chaos. “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” Within that worldview, everything he does makes sense.
Another approach is to let the audience initially sympathize with the villain or agree with them at one point. But as the story unfolds and the villain clashes with the hero, the consequences of the villain’s worldview become clear. Their actions reveal who they really are.
This works in stories with twists as well. Think of The Fugitive, where the cop chasing the hero ends up helping him at the end. They unite to defeat the true enemy.
When I construct a story, I see both the hero and the villain as embodying worldviews. Their conflict is a clash of beliefs. In Jezebel, she embodies pagan sophistication. She brings in Baal worship and believes she is improving Israel.
Jehu, on the other hand, is devoted to God and to the king. He sees the king being influenced by Jezebel, but cannot speak up because she is not doing anything overtly evil. She is simply guiding the king toward her worldview.
The hero struggles with conflicting values. He must remain loyal to the king, as God commanded, yet he must not follow the king into idolatry. When the villain’s worldview is believable and realistic, the conflict becomes meaningful.
The outcome of the story reveals which worldview is superior. As characters live out their values, their choices lead to moral consequences. That is part of the philosophical power of storytelling.
Take Braveheart. It wrestles with freedom versus security. The King of England, the villain, seeks control. William Wallace seeks freedom. Robert the Bruce, the antagonist, seeks compromise and peace. But compromise with tyranny results in slavery, as we see when the king enslaves and kills. Freedom, though costly, becomes the higher value.
The interplay among villain, antagonist, and hero creates dramatic tension. How you conclude the story reveals what you believe about the world. That is why I seldom write unhappy endings. Tragedy has its place, but I avoid down endings simply because “happy endings are fake.” Stories are not real life. Stories are about how life should be. Whether the villain is vanquished or not expresses your view of the way the world ought to function.
How does storytelling shape readers’ worldviews?
Thomas: Storytelling is a powerful act because readers’ experiences of your story become part of their experience of the world. Much of what people believe does not come from real life but from stories.
A good example is arranged marriage. Most people have a negative view of arranged marriage, not because they know anyone personally who suffered from one, but because fiction portrays arranged marriage negatively. Yet statistics show that in countries with both systems, arranged marriages often last longer and are happier.
I have spoken with people in India who strongly advocate for arranged marriage, but the idea would never gain traction here because the power of our fiction is so strong. We cannot even imagine its benefits.
By crafting villains and stories, we shape how people see the world. That is an important responsibility. What mistakes do you see Christian authors making when crafting their villains?
What mistakes do Christian authors make when portraying villains?
Brian: One common mistake in Christian movies and Christian fiction involves the portrayal of sin. In my book Hollywood Worldviews, I talk about sex, violence, and depicting sin in stories. A key question is how explicit or detailed you should be when portraying the evil the hero is fighting.
This is a gray area, and there is room for debate. But I have seen Christians, often out of fear of their audience or concerns about propriety, avoid showing the more extreme or explicit aspects of evil. I understand that tension. I have dealt with it myself.
But sometimes you need to show the evil for the villain to be believable. People know real evil exists. If you avoid portraying it at all, your story may ring false.
For example, if you are dealing with child molestation, how much do you show? There are legal and moral limits, of course. But simply avoiding the subject altogether removes the reality of the evil.
My film To End All Wars tells the true story of what Allied prisoners suffered under the Japanese in World War II. Should we avoid showing that suffering because it is offensive or difficult to watch? The Japanese treated prisoners like the Nazis treated the Jews. Torture and brutality were real. We included limits on what we depicted, but we had to show enough for viewers to understand the gravity of the evil.
Thomas: I will say, though, you did get an R rating on that film. It is one of the few R-rated Christian movies.
Brian: Yes, and we also had a lot of cussing in it. I realize this is not specifically part of crafting a villain, but it relates to depicting sin and how accurately you show evil.
If we had not portrayed the prisoners’ suffering truthfully, or their violent responses to that suffering, the Gospel message in the story would have lost its power. We included cussing and brutality because that was the truth of what happened.
As a result, we could not get any Christian companies to distribute it. I understand there are market issues. If their audience will not buy it, they will not produce it. We even tried for a PG-13 rating, but the realism of the violence kept it in R territory, even after we cut scenes.
How should Christian authors portray evil in their stories?
Brian: That is the tension. How do you accurately depict evil in a way that inspires people to stand up and fight it if you sanitize it? Too often Christian movies portray bad guys like they came out of a 1970s television show. Even as a Christian, I do not believe what they portray because it is not true.
I am not saying, “Show everything.” We wrestle with limits. I use implication in much of my writing. You do not always have to show explicit detail. But sometimes you need one moment where the villain’s evil is shown clearly enough that the audience feels its weight. Without that, the redemption in the story will not feel believable.
How do audience expectations shape what Christian authors can write?
Thomas: Putting on my marketing hat, because I work with authors on positioning, this is the biggest difference between Christians who write books and “Christian books.”
If you think of Christian books as a market, sold through Christian bookstores to a very specific audience, that audience expects a minimal depiction of evil. If you portray evil explicitly, you violate their expectations. It is like writing a romance where the couple does not end up together. The genre promise has been broken.
A Christian book, as the market defines it, excludes certain elements. The Bible does not. The Bible depicts evil clearly without glorifying it. But the Christian market, usually fundamentalist and very conservative, has its own boundaries.
Some writers say, “I want to write edgy Christian books.” And I tell them, you can write them, but no one in the Christian market will buy them. If you want to write edgy books, write secular books. Be a Christian who writes secular fiction.
There are successful fantasy authors who are Christians, and you can see their worldview in their work, but their books are not packaged as Christian books because they would offend the Christian-bookstore audience. Navigating that requires truly understanding your target reader.
How should Christian authors balance honesty with sensitivity?
Brian: As a Christian author with a Christian audience, I have had to rein in my own freedom and pride. When I first started The Chronicles of the Nephilim, I thought, “If Christians cannot handle the violence in the Bible, that is their problem. I will include everything.” And I wrote that way at first.
But eventually I realized that if I want to help my readers grow in understanding, I might need to pull back, be more creative, and guide them step by step.
That is why I wrote Hollywood Worldviews, to help Christians watch movies with discernment, rather than either rejecting everything because of sex and violence or watching everything in the name of freedom. There is a middle ground.
One of my goals has been to show Christians how much violence, sex, and strong language is actually in the Bible. If they truly accept that, they may realize their standards for other media are sometimes too harsh.
For example, the Song of Solomon is far more explicit in Hebrew than in English. Our translators were prudes. The Bible also includes detailed descriptions of violence, including beheadings and murders, and it includes blasphemy spoken by wicked characters. Some Christians say, “I can handle some violence or implied sexuality in movies, but not taking the Lord’s name in vain.” But the Bible depicts people blaspheming God and records their words.
The point is not to justify sin but to depict it truthfully enough that the redemption has power. The power of redemption is only as strong as the accuracy of the sin portrayed.
Something has to turn your stomach. That moral revulsion is what moves us to change and to act.
This is why stories about real injustices, such as child soldiers or conflict diamonds, show disturbing truths. Blood Diamond, for example, revealed the exploitation behind the diamond trade. After that movie, the market changed as buyers refused to purchase conflict diamonds.
That is the power of storytelling. When evil is depicted truthfully and with emotional weight, it awakens moral conviction. Sometimes that requires showing the evil in explicit, intense ways so that audiences recognize its reality and feel compelled to respond.
What elements make a strong villain?
Thomas: One example where villains were done well is in the Left Behind books. I felt they did a really good job with the Antichrist, making him very charismatic. You want to like him. He appears on the scene as a humanitarian who helps solve the world’s problems. That is what the Antichrist is like. He is not a mustache twirler. He seems like Christ. He seems like the good guy, but there is a twist. There is a darkness, and you have to be vigilant.
What are some of the elements that go into creating a strong villain? We already talked about having a strong motivation. The villain has to want something just like your protagonist does. What are some other elements of making a good villain?
Give Your Villain a Strong Worldview
Brian: I would say give the villain a worldview, a way of seeing the world that you disagree with but want to address as a storyteller. You want to help people see, “This is not the way to see the world.” Whether it is humanism, atheism, or something else, there are many worldviews you can draw from.
When you write your villain, try to enter into that worldview and write the villain fairly. Write the best version of that belief. Our tendency is to make all the atheists terrible people who either die or convert by the end.
Instead, make the atheist, or whatever worldview you are portraying, as strong and appealing as possible. A great example is the beginning of the movie Unplanned, which tells the story of a woman who worked at Planned Parenthood. It is a pro-life film, yet it starts by showing some pro-lifers being mean, shouting, and cursing at people going into the clinic. At first, you can find yourself leaning toward the Planned Parenthood side. The heroine wants to help women. She genuinely believes she is doing good.
She is not the villain, but that approach shows how you can portray opposing views with sympathy. Do the same with your villain. Give them as much sympathy and humanity as you give your hero, so they feel like someone who could truly exist in the world. Then, as you write, show how ideas have consequences.
Pick a worldview for your villain. Be as sympathetic as you can. Let them act consistently with that worldview as they fight the hero. You want the best version of the opposing view, not the worst. Do not think, “I want to make atheists look bad.” Instead, make your atheist the strongest, smartest, kindest person you can within that worldview.
The more honest you are about the humanity of all your characters, the better your story will be and the more it will connect with people. Make your villains as human as possible.
Thomas: In the language of persuasion, what you are describing is avoiding the straw man. A straw man is a logical fallacy where, in debate, you represent your opponent’s argument in an especially weak or overstated way so it is easier to defeat.
The problem with defeating a straw man, whether in fiction or nonfiction, is that it has very little persuasive impact. The rebuttal is easy: “That is not what we actually believe.” You are not defeating their real argument. You are defeating a shadow of it.
An author who does a great job of avoiding straw men is C. S. Lewis, both in his fiction and his nonfiction. When he portrays a worldview, he often presents a strong version of the opposing argument. I am thinking of a scene from The Silver Chair where the witch has cast her spell, and everyone is drugged. She says, “There is no such thing as Aslan.” They protest, “Yes, there is,” and try to describe him. They say, “He is like a cat,” and she replies that they are simply imagining a bigger version of a cat. The cat is what is real. Aslan is just an invention.
That is a powerful argument. It is not watered down, and yet it is wrong. We know from the story that it is completely wrong. When they defeat her intellectually and physically, it is far more satisfying because they defeat the strong version of the argument, not a straw man.
Give Your Villain a Weakness
Brian: In the same way, bring out the weaknesses of your hero. Let your hero lose in some aspects because no viewpoint is perfect. If you are not honest enough to recognize the weaknesses of your own view, or your hero’s view, then you risk turning the hero into a straw man as well.
Give the hero something wrong or weak in the way they see the world. Let them lose or be mistaken in some conflicts with the villain.
Give Your Villain a Positive Character Trait
Also, give the villain at least one genuinely positive element, no matter how bad they are. For example, if you have a gangster who murders people, you might show that he loves children and protects them. Give him something that shows no one is entirely evil. That humanizes the villain and makes the story more interesting.
How do you decide what your characters do next?
Brian: For me, it comes back to worldview. The hero and the villain both embody a worldview. If you understand how they see the world, you can better discern what they will do next.
Ask, “What kind of person are they? What do they believe about the world?” If a character believes, “Everyone is selfish and out to get me,” that person will tend to be selfish and suspicious of everyone else. If they believe, “Everyone is out to hurt me,” they will behave in ways that protect themselves from being hurt.
Once you understand your character’s worldview, you do not have to sit there wondering, “What should I do next?” That helps with writer’s block. I rarely struggle with story direction because I know how my hero and villain see the world. Their worldview guides what they want, what they fear, and what they will pursue.
If you are a story reader or watcher, you can reverse the process. When you watch a villain, ask, “What do they believe about the world? What are they trying to accomplish? What is the pseudo-good they are seeking?” That pseudo-good is often what the storyteller wants to expose and dismantle.
Why are good intentions so dangerous in villains?
Thomas: Remember that both Hitler and Stalin were trying to create paradise on earth. Hitler wanted more room and prosperity for Germans. Stalin was trying to bring about a communist utopia where everyone lived out the communist ideal.
Yet they were two of the biggest villains of the twentieth century. Their “good” intentions led to the deaths of millions of people. In many ways, those good intentions made them more dangerous because they believed they had a righteous cause. They were able to justify evil to themselves because they were doing it for a good end.
They believed, “The end justifies my evil means.” As Christians, we have a different worldview. We trust God with the ends, and we are responsible for the means.
This has been a really fun conversation. I love talking about how to craft better characters.
Connect with Brian Godawa
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