14 Diabolical Female Villains Who Give Lady Macbeth A Run For Her Money

Helena Bonham Carter is no stranger to playing maniacal women. Her performance as Bellatrix Lestrange in the Harry Potter franchise steals every scene she appears in and even makes you wonder if she might be more malevolent than the Dark Lord himself. In Tim Burton’s 2007 adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sweeney Todd, she plays a similar role as the No. 1 cheerleader and enabler of a murderous villain. Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp) is a Victorian barber in London who’s turned personal tragedy into an excuse for a killing spree. Believing that everyone “deserves to die,” he uses his blades to cut short as many lives as possible. But his proactive nihilism does not extend to intelligent planning. He shoves the first corpse into a chest and immediately starts thinking about his next kill. Luckily for him, Mrs. Lovett (Bonham Carter), a widow who sells “the worst pies in London” below his shop, has more presence of mind. Proposing that they grind up the bodies and use them as ingredients for her pies, she ensures that Todd’s misdeeds remain undetectable.

Unlike other female villains in the mold of Lady Macbeth, Mrs. Lovett isn’t concerned with power. Her unrequited love for Sweeney is what drives her to help him, along with a latent psychotic streak. Even for audiences accustomed to movies about murder, habitual cannibalism is a pretty extreme deviation from acceptable behavior. But Mrs. Lovett takes to the grisly day-to-day realities of her scheme with gusto, and soon, her shop is bustling with customers. While Sweeney is nothing but unfocused hatred, Mrs. Lovett is the mastermind behind his success. Without her, he’d only get away with a few slayings before the corpses started piling up at the back door and caught the attention of the authorities. 

In a show full of drug lords, hitmen, money launderers, and small-town crooks, a Chicago housewife probably isn’t the person you’d expect to be the most cold-blooded villain of them all. And yet, Wendy Byrde (Laura Linney) turns out to be a woman so sociopathic that even the head of Mexico’s second largest drug cartel is a little scared of her. Hiding behind a suburban mom persona, she repeatedly cooks up deadly schemes under the pretense of “keeping the family safe,” even when it involves killing a member of said family. She is so ruthless and bloodthirsty that both her children disown her. Her husband, Marty (Jason Bateman), the person responsible for putting the family on the payroll of the cartel in the first place, is terrified of her by the end of the series and repeatedly tries to temper her actions. 

Marty starts laundering for the cartel because he’s good at it, enjoys the extra money, and enjoys the thrill of it. For Wendy, however, it’s a ticket to political power. With a background in campaign management, she is a strategic genius whose ambitions grow with every victory. During the final season, Marty devises multiple plans to escape the cartel and go off-grid for the rest of their lives, but Wendy sabotages him at every turn, determined to gain influence on the global stage rather than disappear into peaceful retirement. Every time she causes someone’s death, she uses it as fuel to push ahead, as if she needs to make something positive out of the violence in order to justify it. Her decisions force her family into deeper levels of peril and criminal entanglement, and by the end of the series, it’s clear that she is running the show. Everyone else, including her husband, is just along for the ride.

No, William Oldroyd’s 2016 indie drama Lady Macbeth is not a spinoff of Shakespeare’s character, nor is it set in the same period. The movie follows Katherine (Florence Pugh), a teenager in 1860s England who is sold into marriage to a cruel older man (Paul Hilton) who offers her neither warmth nor interest. Her numbing isolation is brought to an end when she strikes up a passionate affair with a stable boy named Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis), but her newfound liberation and desire awaken a darker side that is not satiated by sex. When she is punished for her infidelity, she efficiently and dispassionately murders her sadistic father-in-law, husband, and everyone else who disapproves. 

Katherine begins her marriage as a stereotypical victim of a patriarchal society only to transform into the powerful antihero of a revenge fantasy. Her affair with Sebastian unlocks a reservoir of untapped authority that is at first inspiring and then terrifying. By the end of the movie, she is neither a victim nor an antihero. Her brutality has extended beyond revenge killing into a barbaric lust for physical and psychological cruelty that is so disturbing, even her accomplices want out. In her breakout role as Katherine, Pugh demonstrates all the ferocious power she would later demonstrate in major Hollywood movies, but the darkness of Alice Birch’s script allows her to explore depths of villainy that few Hollywood movies would dare to show.

Cool, calm, softly spoken, and utterly unflappable, Claire Underwood (Robin Wright) is a chilling antihero whose self-control makes her more akin to a cyborg than a human. When she first appears in Beau Willimon’s political thriller, House of Cards, she is the unfulfilled wife of charismatic South Carolina congressman Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey). As the series progresses, she moves from her ethically flexible role in a nonprofit to the presidency of the United States through sheer force of will and unscrupulousness. Robin Wright has described her as “a gal that gets things done, no matter what it takes.” And yes, that includes murder.

Even before Kevin Spacey was fired from the show for sexual assault allegations, Claire Underwood was the driving force behind the narrative. Frank may have had similar levels of ambition and ruthlessness, but Claire was prepared to outsmart and double-cross him, something he never showed a willingness to do. When she assumes the presidency at the end of Season 5, she shows no sign of upholding her deal to grant Frank a presidential pardon. She blocks his calls, turns to the camera, and says, “My turn.” Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth ultimately commits suicide due to crippling guilt. Claire Underwood has a stronger stomach. From the beginning, she is ready to reap the benefits of her crimes.

Robert Eggers’s epic Viking tale, The Northman, follows the plot of another Shakespeare play, Hamlet. But in the second half of the film, the main character’s mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman) reveals herself to be more similar to Lady Macbeth than to Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) is a warrior prince seeking to avenge his father’s death and rescue his mother from his fratricidal uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang). When he finally murders his way to Queen Gudrún, however, she drops a bombshell, telling him that she is not Fjölnir’s victim, but his accomplice. When she was a teenager, Amleth’s father enslaved and impregnated her through rape. She wanted Fjölnir to slay the king and Amleth. She’s now happily married to him and has a young son born of love. After blindsiding Amleth with this revelation, Gudrún steps forward and passionately kisses him. Later, she tries to kill him. 

For most of the movie, Queen Gudrún is a regal bystander, a picture of wifely loyalty and a sacred memory to fuel Amleth’s thirst for revenge. Few actors could have delivered the plot twist as forcefully as Kidman. Queen Gudrún revels in her wickedness and proves herself to be a formidable match for a man who has spent a decade murdering people out of hatred. There is nothing restrained or benevolent about her. She, too, was on a quest for revenge, but unlike Amleth, she was successful. While her fate is bloody, she proves she is just as willing to pick up a sword as she is to plot her family’s death. Queen Gudrún is an ice-cold villain whose savagery is made all the more shocking by how masterfully she disguises it behind a mask of quiet dignity. According to Eggers, Kidman’s monologue is “one of the scenes [he’s] truly proud of.”

Clint Eastwood’s 2003 drama Mystic River revolves around three childhood friends, Dave (Tim Robbins), Sean (Kevin Bacon), and Jimmy (Sean Penn). In 1975, while playing in their Boston neighborhood, Dave was abducted by pedophiles and abused for days before he escaped. Twenty-five years later, the three men are defined by this trauma. When Jimmy’s teenage daughter Katie is slain, the men are brought back together, but not in solidarity. Blinded by grief, Jimmy, a former gangster who is now trying to be a family man for his second wife Annabeth (Laura Linney) and their two daughters, vows to find and kill his daughter’s assailant. Sean, now a cop, leads the investigation. And Dave, who remains crippled by his harrowing past, comes under suspicion. Believing wrongfully that Dave is the guilty party, Jimmy executes him.

While the movie ostensibly focuses on the three men, Annabeth plays a pivotal role. She spends most of the movie standing resolutely by Jimmy’s side, supporting him through grief, but in his most vulnerable moment, she reveals her real motives. When Jimmy learns that Dave was innocent, he is wracked with unbearable guilt. Putting her arms around him and speaking in a whisper, Annabeth tells him that he is “a king” and that sometimes kings have to do hard things to protect their families. “You could rule this town,” she whispers, alluding to the potential he once had as a gangster. This quiet coercion is a gut punch to Jimmy, who failed to protect his eldest daughter and needs more than ever to feel like a protector to his remaining children. With this scene, Annabeth comes into focus. She isn’t the pillar of spousal loyalty that she appeared to be. She is a predator waiting to pounce. In the final scene as they stand outside their home watching a local parade, Jimmy is finally calm, controlled, and at ease. Looking across the crowd at Sean, the men lock eyes as if to underscore their distance. With his cold, steady gaze, Jimmy signals that Annabeth’s speech hit its mark.