25 Actors Whose Characters Have Died The Most Times On-Screen

Content Warning: The following article contains some spoilers.A fictional death is always preferable to a real-life one. The former can happen over and over again, whilst the latter, unfortunately, happens just once, and then that’s it. It can be hard to see a fictional character depart their fictional mortal coil, but at least the actor can (and usually does) go through reincarnation – in a way – and show up as a new character in a new piece of entertainment. Death is inevitable and constant in fiction, which means that the question of which actor has died the most times on screen is never set in stone. Every new thriller, action, or horror movie can get someone closer to claiming the title of the most killed actor. For as long as there’s on-screen violence, there will be fictional deaths, and looking at those actors who have the most on-screen deaths remains a morbidly interesting subject for fans of genres where violence is common.

Certain actors in certain genres are going to be more likely to die than others, and when looking at the actors who have died the most on-screen, it’s clear that those who often appear in horror or action movies (particularly as villains) are seen as the most fictionally expendable. It’s a testament to how often some of these actors have died that the infamously “always playing doomed characters” Sean Bean isn’t even at the #1 spot, as many might’ve expected…

25

Brian Cox

23 deaths

He’s probably best known for playing a terrible parent in Succession, but Brian Cox has done so much more than just that role, including being in a bunch of movies where he’s played characters who’ve died. Some of this might come about because he’s very good at playing villains, and villains seem to die more often than heroes, but there are also movies like The Autopsy of Jane Doe where his less evil characters have perished.

Cox brings the kind of intensity to some of those villain roles, though, where it’s easy to root for his characters to die (as dark as that might sound). Also, while this ranking doesn’t include on-stage roles, Brian Cox has died a lot on stage, too, given he’s a great Shakespearean actor, and that playwright wrote his fair share of death-heavy tragedies, to say the least.

Troy

Release Date

May 14, 2004

Runtime

163 Minutes

24

Christopher Walken

23 deaths

Few actors are as good at playing offbeat roles as Christopher Walken, who’s done so not just in the medium of film, but also at least once very memorably in a music video. Walken is also an Oscar winner, and he won for a movie that was fatal for his character: The Deer Hunter, which is already a bleak war film before you get to the ending (and then it goes up another level).

Christopher Walken is a bit like Brian Cox in the sense that he’s quite well-suited to playing villains, and thereby dies quite a lot in those sorts of roles. But some of his more heroic characters haven’t survived the movies they’ve appeared in, as can be seen in The Dead Zone, which adapts the intense Stephen King novel of the same name, and sees Walken playing a man who’s trying to save the world from a devastating nuclear war.

23

Gary Busey

23 deaths

Gary Busey, like Christopher Walken, tends to play eccentric and unsettling characters very well (he’s also a key reason why the poster for Quigley is so unnerving). Busey is also very well-suited to villainous roles, probably even being typecast in them, to some extent. He’s not always a bad guy, but he is more often than not.

Additionally, Busey has appeared in quite a few genre movies, as well as action flicks, and so when life-or-death stakes are involved, and you’re someone who’s not often cast as a hero, well, then you’re probably going to have to be good at dying on-screen. Busey’s done so a lot, as can be seen in a range of movies, including Point Break, the second Predator film, and the original Lethal Weapon.

22

Willem Dafoe

24 deaths

A key part of some very well-cast 1980s movies, Willem Dafoe first got some serious attention as an actor during that decade, especially with movies like Platoon and The Last Temptation of Christ. His characters perish in both of those films, though the Gospel does describe Jesus coming back from the dead, of course (which, if it were depicted in The Last Temptation of Christ, might make including it here feel debatable).

Actually, that being said, his character dies in Spider-Man, but then comes back, thanks to some multiversal chaos, in Spider-Man: No Way Home, so maybe the jury’s out on that film, too. Anyway, Dafoe has been in a ton of movies, and is good at playing villains (though he doesn’t always appear as one), so, mathematically speaking, it checks out that he’s died quite a few times on screen, even if at least a couple of those deaths might not count as “final” in the traditional sense.

Spider-Man

Release Date

May 3, 2002

Runtime

121 Minutes

21

Robert Patrick

24 deaths

If you only know Robert Patrick from one film, it’s probably Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which is up there as one of the greatest sci-fi/action movies ever made. He’s in that film as the central villain, not looking as intimidating as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s villainous character in the first movie (and he’s not even framed as the antagonist at first), but he ends up being surprisingly powerful and intimidating.

Patrick has worked steadily since that second Terminator movie, and did have roles prior to it, too (including a deadly one in Die Hard 2). Once more, he’s an actor who’s good at playing villainous and/or shady characters, and seems to appear in genre films that have higher death counts than, say, dramas or comedies, all of which contribute to Robert Patrick having died more than 20 times on the big screen.

20

Gary Oldman

24 deaths

Gary Oldman isn’t always a villain, but he is undoubtedly good at playing deliciously evil figures on screen. And villains themselves don’t always die, but it is more common for them to end up that way by a film’s conclusion compared to most other characters, and so it’s not surprising that Oldman’s characters from movies like Leon: The Professional and The Fifth Element perish.

In addition, Gary Oldman has also portrayed some real-life figures in biographical/historical films whose deaths play a part in retelling true events, as seen when he played Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK and Sid Vicious in Sid & Nancy. Oldman can do it all as an actor, and that carries over to his capacity to die convincingly on film, again and again, whether playing fictional or real-life people.

19

Donald Sutherland

25 deaths

Over a career that spanned numerous decades, it’s an inevitability that Donald Sutherland played a number of doomed characters during his time as an actor. Having an immense number of credited roles to your name makes that something of a simple fact of life. Or death. Sutherland was perhaps destined for this, given one of his earliest (and best roles) saw him be one of the titular dozen in the death-filled The Dirty Dozen.

Donald Sutherland also played some vile characters whose deaths were well-deserved, as exemplified by the likes of 1900 and The Hunger Games series (he was the central antagonist of the latter). His son, Kiefer Sutherland, on the other hand, is noteworthy for cheating death in his most famous role to date: playing Jack Bauer in 24, a federal agent who’s taken dozens—if not hundreds—of lives, but continually cheated (permanent) death throughout the show’s run.

18

John Saxon

25 deaths

John Saxon might be most well-remembered for having a role in the remarkable martial arts movie that was Enter the Dragon, though his character did survive that one. Elsewhere, Saxon’s characters have proven less fortunate. But, as with Donald Sutherland, part of this could be because John Saxon was a prolific actor. As Uncle Ben might say if he was a movie buff, “With a great filmography comes a great number of deaths.”

Saxon is also well-known for playing a part in the two best Nightmare on Elm Street movies, the first and the third one, with his character getting killed off in the latter. Few people are safe from Freddy Krueger, after all, who himself has seemed to die a bunch of times but rarely has trouble coming back to terrorize a new collection of teenagers in each film.

17

Rutger Hauer

25 deaths

Best remembered for playing the tragic antagonist in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer also had a knack for playing villains, dying a lot on screen as a result. As shown with Blade Runner, though, he could bring a certain amount of humanity to such characters (ironically, in that film, he’s a replicant, being hunted down by an arguably less emotional human).

Then, there’s something like The Hitcher, where Rutger Hauer is relishing the opportunity to play someone unequivocally evil; an antagonist viewers probably won’t be able to wait to see perish by the film’s end. He was in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, too, in a more cartoonishly villainous role, and then succeeded later in his career in playing an ultimately doomed antihero: the lead character in the gory Hobo with a Shotgun.

16

Sean Bean

25 deaths

Yes, few actors are as associated with the on-screen death scene as much as Sean Bean. The actor is infamous for dying a bunch of times, perhaps most evidently in the world of fantasy. Bean’s two most acclaimed roles are in The Lord of the Rings (mostly the first film) and Game of Thrones (only the first season).

His characters don’t make it far, and their deaths up the stakes for the story to come. Sean Bean also died in a James Bond movie, arguably twice, given GoldenEye starts with his character seemingly dying, and then he returns as an antagonist, and actually dies near the film’s conclusion. That dying is tied to Bean’s legacy, for better or worse, but he’s also a genuinely good actor in his own right; the dying meme is a bit of morbid fun, really.