Colonel Hans Landa

Christoph Waltz's Colonel Hans Landa is the most charming Nazi in cinema history, and that charm is precisely what makes him so dangerous. Quentin Tarantino wrote the role as 'the greatest character I've ever written,' and Waltz delivered a performance so definitive that it is impossible to imagine anyone else in the part. Landa is a detective — the 'Jew Hunter' — and his method is not violence but conversation. He talks. He smiles. He drinks milk. And by the time you realize the conversation has been an interrogation, it is too late.

The opening scene of Inglourious Basterds — Landa's interrogation of a French dairy farmer hiding a Jewish family beneath his floorboards — is the most tension-filled dialogue scene in modern cinema. Waltz plays it with a terrifying joviality, switching between languages, complimenting the farmer's daughters, requesting a glass of milk. Every pleasant word is a trap. Every smile conceals a calculation. The scene runs nearly twenty minutes and does not waste a second.

Waltz won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor — his first English-language film role — and deserved it absolutely. Landa is the rare villain who is more interesting than the heroes, more entertaining than the action, and more memorable than the film's considerable spectacle. He is a sociopath who has found the perfect profession — one that rewards his intelligence, his multilingual charm, and his complete lack of moral feeling.