Ranking Cinema's 10 Best Sets of Villainous Cheekbones

By Dustin Rowles | Lists | June 2, 2014

There’s a long history in cinema of using sharp, pointy cheekbones to denote villainy, a trope I never really picked up on until this weekend’s Maleficent, in which Angelia Jolie’s cheekbones were CGI-enhanced to the point of obnoxiousness. I mean: Jolie has high cheekbones as it is. It hardly seemed necessary to make them even more sharp and angular, and do it in such a way that in some scenes the CGI looked painfully obvious, as though she’d had a small pocket knife inserted into each cheek.

But I get it. The always family-friendly Disney wanted to create the illusion of villainy without really demonstrating it, which would have alienated a younger, sensitive audience that might have been turned off by interesting or meaningful sequences. If Maleficent had actually done something horrible, then 10-year-old children might have needed to consider the ambiguity of her character instead of knowing all along that, beneath those high-pointy cheekbones, there was a soft, fleshy heart.

Children ruin everything, even movies.

Still, Maleficent did highlight the prevalence of villainous cheekbones, and so I have taken the liberty below of ranking the ten most villainous of them all.

10. Bellatrix Lestrange in the Harry Potter series