Writing the Antihero
Making Your Audience Love the Bad Guy
by Jaden
What is an antihero?
An antihero is a villainous main character of your story, a protagonist who is not quite as nice or good or perfect as the archetypical hero. An antihero has serious personality flaws and often may be the stereotypical bad guy, a downright villain, but for some reason, we like him or her. Antiheroes are often criminals and we see the story from their perspective, which causes us to relate.
An archetypical hero may be beautiful, strong, noble, rich, blessed, intelligent, lucky, or have super powers; an antihero will try to get those things in corrupt ways.
The envy and hate a person may feel towards the hero may create an antihero, a less fortunate person driven by sin, basic instinct, or need to ignoble actions.
The antihero can be the underdog who becomes top dog by unscrupulous methods.
A most famous example of an antihero is the character Tony Montana played by Al Pacino in Scarface (1983), a poor Cuban guy with a crazy temper who climbs up to great wealth as a drug dealer, pictured above with his foxy wife played by Michelle Pfeiffer.
Why do you have to make your audience love your antihero?
Your audience has to love your antihero or your script won’t sell. Movies with fully detestable lead characters do not sell.
People do not want to be angered or depressed by a movie, they want to feel charged and rejuvenated. When people go to see a movie, they want relief in some sort of way. If your lead character only makes people feel uncomfortable and frustrated, or they do not relate to him or her at all, you will have a flop of a movie.
The antihero serves the common people by taking action where the rest of us don’t because our good morals and laws prevent us. The antihero reacts to his anger about perceived injustices that may have to do with money, crime, war, bad manners, or relationships, whereas the average person will do nothing. We want this bad guy to succeed because we are secretly angry too, but we can’t do anything about it.
The antihero serves a very important part of society, filling a void in our lives, the void where we feel powerless. The antihero makes us feel like something right is being done to equalize things, even if it is wrong.
The antihero is our hero because he is doing what no one else wants to do and he takes all the heat for it.
How do you write your antihero into your script so that your audience will love him or her?
By telling the story from your villainous antihero’s perspective, the audience is forced to relate with him or her on some level. You must show why your antihero became the way he did, why he does what he does, and give the audience a reasonable answer to which we can all relate.
The antihero must have traits to which the audience can relate. The antihero may have a family he is trying to save, protect, or support. The antihero may have basic needs that everyone has, trying to make money to eat and support himself. The antihero may have a love interest who is his weakness — we can all relate to being in love.
No matter how bad you make your antihero, as long as he or she has personality traits and life circumstances to which the audience can relate, you can write a successful antihero.
The motivations of your antihero have to be something to which your audience can relate. Wanting money, power, living comforts, and love are some of the most common motivations with which we can empathize.
As the antihero is doing bad things, he must be punished, so don’t forget to punish your antihero. If he doesn’t get punished, then he is just another bad guy, an antagonist, and your audience will hate (and envy) him for getting away with it, which is not good if you want to make money as a screenwriter.
The audience must sympathize with your antihero.
When you write your story for your antihero, imagine that the audience is a court jury and you are the antihero’s defense attorney. It is your duty to convince the jury, that despite all the bad things your client has done, he doesn’t deserve to be punished. And why he doesn’t deserve to be punished (even though he will get punished) is because your jury audience can relate to the motivations of why he did what he did. If you can’t make the jury understand his perspective, you have just another loser creep on the stand that everyone wants to give the death penalty, and that my friend, is not a good antihero and not a financially successful movie either, and you have failed as a defense attorney and as a writer because your client is just so bad and inhuman that no one can relate to him, nobody likes him.
Ultimately, your lead character, whether good or bad, has to win a popularity contest. The majority of people must like him. That’s what movie sales are, they are the public saying, yeah, we love that one, we love that guy. Blockbuster hits are the winners of popularity contests. Love it or hate it, that’s just the way it is. The most popular guy or gal is not necessarily a good person, but it is the person who is most liked.
A well-written antihero will evoke thoughts from the audience like these :
That’s a bad guy, but I can understand why he does what he does. I wouldn’t want to be on his bad side, but I would sure like him on my team. I secretly love him and sometimes wish I was him, but I probably wouldn’t admit that to anyone.
Who are your favorite antiheroes?
Please share in the comments section.
Like this article? Other ScreenwritingforHollywood articles you may like are:
Turning Bad Guys into Good Characters
15 New Script Reviews About 15 Old Movies
My New Book PENAL ENVY On Sale Now!
A Discussion of Unusual Movie Scripts and Marketability
by Jaden
When you write, it is good to keep in mind what is the most important outcome for you: a unique exciting groundbreaking script or a mass appeal marketable movie? True originality and marketability often do not cross paths.
The movies listed here are examples of good scripts that are hard sells because they don’t fit into the blockbuster movie box.
Bubba Ho-tep (2002)
Really cool and weird movie Bubba Ho-tep was made by writer-director Don Coscarelli, derived from a short story by Joe R. Lansdale. A friend wanted to watch this movie and showed me the cover that looked like some silly zombie movie, but since all of his other recommendations were great, I agreed to watch it. 
Pleasantly surprised, this movie was bizarre and awesome.
There is an old guy who thinks he is Elvis (maybe he is, maybe he isn’t, we never really know, the story is plausible). He is in a rest home where old people are, of course, dying. The movie shows us Elvis’s world from his demented old man perspective, which therefore makes things mysteriously fantastic, yet believable.
The mystery to Elvis is: how are all these old people dying? The answer he finds is that this cursed mummy who was accidentally dumped into a nearby river comes to feed on them, sucking out their soul. What better place to eat souls than a place with helpless dying old people, right?
Although it sounds strange, the clever script does a great job of taking us into the mind of looney old lonely people in retirement homes, and for that it is actually a beautiful moving story about getting old, being ignored by loved ones, and dying. The senior citizen issues are explored in an unusual and fun way for young or old people.
Why is Bubba Ho-tep not a blockbuster?
- Genre distortion.
Phil the Alien (2004)
Rob Stefaniuk writes, directs, and stars in the lead role as Phil the Alien. You know what? He does such a good job of writing for and being an alien that I think Mr.Stefaniuk actually is an alien.
I won’t spoil any of this strange story by telling you too much. It involves a local bar, a drunk band that goes nowhere, government secret ops, an alien of course, some local hicks, and certain hilarious inspirations by C.S. Lewis’s book that was made into the movie: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), as well as other famous books and movie references. That’s all I am going to tell you.
This script is really weird. People on IMDB have rated it rather low, 5 out of 10… boring people! Probably not the kind of people with whom you want to go out and have a raging good time, because that is what this movie is: absolute silliness. The movie appears to be low budget: please don’t let that turn you off; it is a goofy entertaining good movie script!
Why is Phil the Alien not a blockbuster?
- Low budget and very specific humor style that does not appeal to everyone.
The Dead Girl (2006)
The Dead Girl, a relatively unknown movie, stars none-other than the very well known actor Brittany Murphy who recently passed away at 32 years old due to cardiac arrest on December 20, 2009. It is always eerie the irony of what actors play in their movies and what happens to them in their real lives.
I think Christopher Reeves playing Superman and then becoming quadriplegic is one of the worst Hollywood ironies of all time. Click here for an interesting article about the Superman Curse. I watched Superman as a very little girl and just loved him.
Totally getting derailed on movie roles irony… sorry.
You don’t know that Brittany plays the dead girl until the very last sequence of the movie. You don’t even see her until the end due to the script’s unique story structure.
The story opens with the story of the very odd homebody girl who finds the dead girl and dates some creepy local guy who is intrigued by what she found. Then we cut to various other people who have something to do with the dead girl: the coroner who thinks it is her long lost missing sister, the murderer’s wife, the prostitute friend of the dead girl, the long lost mother, the dead girl’s daughter, the murderer, and so on. Each person has his or her own personal relationship with the dead girl that takes place within their own tale.
It is a fantastic script, twisted, and dark.
I don’t think you can have a runaway blockbuster movie hit with this type of writing structure because it is too disjointed for most people to enjoy, but it is a good study for you to open your mind to other possible story structures.
The Dead Girl is written and directed by Karen Moncrieff and has an all star cast: Giovanni Ribisi, Rose Byrne, James Franco, Mary Steenburgen, Toni Collette, Marcia Gay Harden, Josh Brolin, Kerry Washington and more.
The Dead Girl is not a horror movie, as the title may suggest, it is a murder mystery drama that takes you on a psychological journey through the emotions and effects of death and murder on people.
Why is The Dead Girl not a blockbuster?
- There is no singular hero to follow and the story structure is broken up into fragmented vignettes.
What all of these movies have in common is that they are not classic Hollywood writing styles and they do not immediately jump off the shelves to most people. It is hard to market them because they are different from the norm and what you expect; they don’t easily fit into one genre category.
My movie examples above are not “high concept” films.
High concept films, you can sum up in one word or one sentence, like: Titanic or Snakes on a Plane or Armageddon, the title says it all. With blockbusters like these, you know what you are going to get, you can expect to have a hero, some background history, and closure at the end of the film.
With the films I have highlighted in this post, the titles are just one portion of the unexpected things you will experience.
It is good to watch movies like these to understand and recognize the difference between blockbusters and the financially less successful films. Pay attention to story structure, topics, and dialog; how you choose to tell your story determines the financial success of it.
The further away you get from basic story-telling structure, one genre, and appeasing the masses with a widely accepted humor, the less money you can expect to make.
Every now and then, there is someone who breaks the mold, like Tarantino, but Tarantino is extremely well studied in movies, he purposefully and intelligently plays with genres, humor, and he always has a hero.
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