Bill the Butcher

Daniel Day-Lewis's Bill the Butcher is the most ferociously physical villain performance of the 21st century — a nativist gang lord who rules the Five Points of 1860s New York with a glass eye emblazoned with an American eagle and a collection of butcher's knives that he throws with surgical precision. Day-Lewis, in his first collaboration with Martin Scorsese, created a character so overwhelming that he threatens to consume the entire film. Every scene Bill is in belongs to Bill, and every scene he is not in feels like it is waiting for him to return.

Day-Lewis prepared for the role by training as a butcher, studying the history of the Know-Nothing movement, and listening to Eminem to find Bill's rhythmic speech patterns. The result is a performance that feels genuinely dangerous. Bill's accent — a peculiar, archaic New York drawl — has never been heard before or since. His physicality — the way he holds a knife, the way he stands over a defeated opponent, the way he taps his glass eye with a blade to prove a point — is mesmerizing.

Bill the Butcher represents American nativism in its purest, most violent form. He hates immigrants because he sees himself as the true American, the descendant of those who built the country through blood. Day-Lewis makes this philosophy simultaneously repulsive and charismatic, which is exactly what makes real nativism so dangerous: it sounds like patriotism until you see the knife.