The 10 Most Unusual James Bond Villains

Until about a decade ago, James Bond was pretty unapologetically gimmicky. Villains had goofy names and goofier plans, and M gave Bond ridiculous spy tools to use on his missions. Bond was suave as ever, but sometimes to the detriment of realism and the action.

I love every iteration of Bond, and I love those weird and wacky villains and henchmen he fought. There are hats, teeth, thighs, and a man who can't feel pain. Some of those gimmicks came from Fleming, some from producers, and some from on-set accidents. In today’s post, we're counting the strangest of them all and looking at some craft decisions behind them.

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Auric Goldfinger (Goldfinger)

This one is weird for a few reasons, mainly because he wants to… let me check my notes… irradiate the gold in Fort Knox so the world's gold becomes worthless, and only his gold is good.

Our own Goldfinger piece calls that brand of economic chaos new territory for movie villains. He's also a petty cheat at both cards and golf.

He also doesn't use his own voice. Gert Fröbe spoke very little English, so Guy Hamilton had him rush his lines to make the dub easier. Michael Collins voiced most of the finished performance, per History.

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Oddjob (Goldfinger)

Staying in Goldfinger for this iconic henchman. Oddjob is a bodyguard whose deadliest weapon is a bowler hat that can knock a statue’s head off. He also smiles through nearly every scene, including his fight with Bond.

Harold Sakata's hand was burned during the electrocution death scene, and he held on until Hamilton called cut, per WhatCulture.

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Dr. Kananga (Live and Let Die)

He's two villains at once. As Kananga, he runs a Caribbean island nation. As Mr. Big, he's a Harlem drug lord, and he becomes Mr. Big via a disguise. His exit is one of the strangest in the series. Bond forces a compressed-gas pellet into his mouth, and he inflates and, uh, explodes.

Actor Yaphet Kotto told Big Issue:

"When I read that script, I said, man, if this is played the wrong way… I had to play Kananga in a way that was so believable you became mesmerized. You see a guy who is completely together—almost as together as James Bond himself."

The film does have dated racial imagery, and Kotto pushed against it.

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Baron Samedi (Live and Let Die)

He's one Bond villain the series just doesn’t explain. He works for Kananga, appears to die in a coffin of snakes, and then he's suddenly in Bond's train, laughing, as the credits roll. James Chapman wrote in Licence to Thrill that the character may be supernatural (via The Spy Command).

Actor Geoffrey Holder also choreographed the film's ceremony dances, per The Spy Command.

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Jaws (The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker)

He's a henchman with steel teeth who bites through cable, wrestles a shark, and survives a fall from a plane without a working parachute. Then, in his second film, he falls in love, switches sides, and speaks his only line: "Well, here's to us!"

Few villains get a romance, a redemption, and a comedic moment all at once.

Actor Richard Kiel told Marshall Julius:

"I told him I wanted to give the character some human characteristics, things like perseverance and frustration that everyone could identify with. No matter what, we all have to carry on, and Jaws became a role model for that. Kind of like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons. Jaws would just straighten his tie, brush off his clothes, and keep going."

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Xenia Onatopp (GoldenEye)

What’s not to love? She’s an ex-Soviet fighter pilot turned assassin who crushes men between her thighs. In Bond tradition, her name is a pun. Bond's send-off quip, "She always did enjoy a good squeeze," just makes it better.

Famke Janssen told The Guardian, "I was very aware of the pitfalls of being a model-turned-actor-turned-Bond girl. I thought 'Bond girl' was such a demeaning term. But I thought: ‘I have nothing to lose; if I do this, I’m going to go all the way.’"

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Boris Grishenko (GoldenEye)

I love, love Boris. He's a henchman with no muscle and no gimmick except a pen he loves to click. He's a smug programmer who loves to say, "I am invincible!" He meets his end when one of his pens turns out to be an explosive, and he is frozen solid by a burst of coolant.

Alan Cumming, who played the character, wrote on his own site:

"Then when I was frozen alive at the very end I nearly lost my hair! I had to stand very still while they dropped a whole load of dry ice on top of me, and I was tied to a pole by a big rubber thing under my costume so that I wouldn't move. However, there were some lumps of hard dry ice, and they stuck to my scalp and wouldn't come off and started to burn. I started to move off the set to get help, but I bounced backwards because of the rubber! And the next thing I saw was a fireman running towards me, and he hosed the dry ice off my head."

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General Golgov (James Bond 007)

Jumping over to Game Boy, this villain has an arms-smuggling scheme that pulls in resurrected film henchmen, including Oddjob. MI6-HQ describes the game as a mash-up of the films. Golgov is a thin riff on the films' General Gogol, ally Zhong Mae is nearly a copy of Wai Lin from Tomorrow Never Dies, and Jaws goes down to a magnet exactly as he did in The Spy Who Loved Me. His amalgamation is the weirdness.

According to Game Boy Essentials, developer Saffire was a small Utah studio with two games to its name. It built the game as a quirky top-down adventure.

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Renard (The World Is Not Enough)

How’s this for a villain? A bullet lodged in his brain is slowly killing off his senses, pain included. The film shows it early, when he holds a heated stone without flinching. The injury also gives him a ticking clock to reach a goal before he dies.

There's also a twist. He's actually a henchman, serving Elektra's plan.

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Colonel Tan-Sun Moon (Die Another Day)

This is another odd one because he's one villain played by two actors, but it goes a step further. Will Yun Lee plays the North Korean colonel, who appears to die in the opening. He comes back as British billionaire Gustav Graves, played by Toby Stephens, after a fictional gene therapy remakes his face.

Paste reads the reveal as the film's satire of Western hypocrisy, writing:

To clarify, the villain of Die Another Day is a North Korean colonel who, through medical and cosmetic means, turns white. On a literal level, it’s fascinating and unsettling, racialization inverting itself and whiteness becoming a snake eating its own tail.

What's your favorite Bond villain?