Best Background Characters

The Best Background Characters: The Zombie/Vampire of Helm’s Deep

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Every story has a cast of characters that we follow and watch and come to love… but what about the background characters? The nameless masses who rarely get our attention? This column examines my favorite background characters who deserve a moment in the spotlight.

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The Movie:

‘The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers’

The Character:

A zombie! (Maybe)

The Scene:

Why He Deserves A Moment In The Spotlight

Despite having watched all three Lord of the Rings movies dozens of times over the years, I’m still finding little moments I never noticed before, and this one may be the weirdest of them all: at 0:10 in the clip above, we can see Rohan soldiers barricading the door to the keep of Helm’s Deep. But if you pause the video at the right moment, you can see what looks shockingly like the pale, emancipated hand of a zombie.

I know this isn’t a zombie, but it sure looks line one, doesn’t it? Alternately, considering how the fingernails almost look like claws, it may also be the hand of a vampire; compare the hand here to Nosferatu’s hand from the upcoming 2024 remake:

While this is certainly the hand of a random soldier that’s stained with Uruk blood and covered in bruises, it’s still fun to imagine that an undead creature of the night came to defend the Rohirrim from Saruman’s hordes, and subsequently went on fun adventures with its new horse-buddies while guzzling mead, camping out in Dunharrow, fighting on the Pelennor Fields, and finally duking it out with orcs at the Black Gates, while never gaining any glory or being remembered by the masses. But he was still there, just out of sight, helping erect barricades and doing his part to save Middle-Earth and its people from Sauron.

The Best Background Characters: The Worst Escort Pilot Ever

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Every story has a cast of characters that we follow and watch and come to love… but what about the background characters? The nameless masses who rarely get our attention? This column examines my favorite background characters who deserve a moment in the spotlight.

The Movie:

‘White House Down’

The Character:

A fighter pilot who needs to rethink their career choices

The Scene:

(the pilot in question appears at 1:18 in the lower left part of the screen)

Why They Deserve A Moment In The Spotlight

I’m a sucker for background characters who… aren’t good at their jobs. And while I think this guy takes the cake for that title, the unseen fighter pilot in this clip comes in a close second: As one of two fighter pilots escorting Air Force One, you’d think that they would be highly trained, capable, and able to defend the President of the United States from any incoming threats. While audiences expect background guard characters to be bad a their jobs and fall with little to no effort, it’s a nice surprise when it turns out that they’re actually competent and know what they’re doing (Like Unknown Hero Agent Man) and can defend the main characters. So when an ICBM rockets towards Air Force One, our pilot notices the threat on their radar and immediately takes action, deploying flares to confuse the missile’s guidance system, causing it to veer harmlessly off course, saving the president and – by extension – America!

Just kidding! The pilot doesn’t do anything as the big missile shoots up and blasts Air Force One into scrap metal. Only then does the pilot (presumably) yell, “Deploying countermeasures!” fire off their flares, and then heroically fly away as fast as possible while Air Force One plunges to its doom. While they would no doubt be fired and given a very stern talking-to by their commander, the pilot could hopefully reflect on their failures, resolve to do better, and finally realize that, at the end of the day, the real countermeasures were the friends we made along the way.

The Best Background Characters: Sauron’s Last Orc

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Every story has a cast of characters that we follow and watch and come to love… but what about the background characters? The nameless masses who rarely get our attention? This column examines my favorite background characters who deserve a moment in the spotlight.

The Game:

‘Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator 2’

The Character:

The last surviving Orc in Sauron’s army after an assault on Minas Tirith

(if auto-play doesn’t work, the relevant scene starts at 22:47)

Why He Deserves A Moment In The Spotlight

When it comes to big battles in fiction, huge numbers of enemy soldiers become faceless masses destined to cut each other down, becoming little more than meat for the grinder; redshirts, if you will. But when an army is whittled down to their last few soldiers, something happens: We become invested in those last few. Rather than them being nameless, faceless soldiers we expect to die, focusing on only a few – or just one – suddenly makes us interested in them. They now have a chance to show some personality and let us know that they’re not mindless soldiers who blindly follow orders.

Here, we get to see what happens when the last surviving orc in Sauron’s army tries to run away from the battle, only to be chased by a blood-drenched Gandalf hell-bent on killing said orc. This poor guy is armed with just a crossbow and probably just wants to get home and see his orc-wife and his orc-kids, and possibly play ball with his orc-dog and feed his orc-goldfish. Instead, he’s being chased by a crazed old man drenched head-to-toe in blood who wants to add the orc’s blood to his grotesque, gloppy suit. And while you can guess what happens, this is a great example of how big battle scenes can be exciting, but small, intimate moments can be more moving.

The Best Background Characters: Palpatine’s Elite Guard Who Is The Worst Shot in Star Wars History

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Every story has a cast of characters that we follow and watch and come to love… but what about the background characters? The nameless masses who rarely get our attention? This column examines my favorite background characters who deserve a moment in the spotlight.

The Movie:

‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’

The Character:

One of Palpatine’s royal guards who is the worst shot in Star Wars History

The Scene:

Why He Deserves A Moment In The Spotlight

A few years ago, I highlighted how one of Snoke’s elite guards fought Kylo Ren by… ramming his armored forearms into Kylo’s lightsaber, accomplishing nothing before being killed. At the time, I thought he was Star Wars’ silliest antagonist, but I recently discovered that there’s another royal guard in a galaxy far, far away who is even sillier. In ‘The Rise of Skywalker,’ Rey takes on Palpatine’s elite guards, the Sovereign Protectors, the cream of the crop of the Final Order, warriors who’s only purpose in life is to defend their emperor to the death, and at this they fail miserably, dying within seconds to a barely-trained girl with a glowy stick of death, rendering a lifetime of Sith indoctrination and training utterly meaningless.

But among their number, there is one guard who’s sheer ineptitude is the stuff of legend. A guard so legendarily bad that his name will be passed down from generation to generation on how not to protect psychotic zombie emperors from beyond the stars… Ceiling Shooting Guy.

At 0:08 in the clip above, a guard on the far left can be seen heroically shooting his laser gun at the ceiling. Not at Rey, the force-wielder with the lightsaber, but at the ceiling of Palpatine’s chamber. Then he pauses, watches Rey for a moment, and then shoots the ceiling again.

How did this guard get the job? What training did he undergo to become Palpatine’s protector? And why, in the moment he’s spent his entire life preparing for, did he decide to shoot the ceiling of the Sith Temple instead of Palpatine’s attacker?

I just love how this guy ended up in a movie with a $416 million budget, some of which surely went to fight choreography (NSFW captions). And yet, we ended up with a guy who shoots the ceiling. Sweet Yoda, I would love to know why the shot was approved, why the filmmakers thought this was okay to put in the finished cut, and I especially love that someone at ILM had to animate these nonsensical blaster shots. But whatever the reason, I’m glad they kept this shot in, because we got an elite Sovereign Protector who decided the best way to protect his emperor was to shoot the ceiling. Hey, for all we know there was a spider up there.

The Best Background Characters: ‘Oh God’ guy

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Every story has a cast of characters that we follow and watch and come to love… but what about the background characters? The nameless masses who rarely get our attention? This column examines my favorite background characters who deserve a moment in the spotlight.

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The Show:

‘The Lenny Henry Christmas Show’

The Character:

A random audience member

The Scene:

Why He Deserves A Moment In The Spotlight

It’s spooky season once again, and what better way to mark the occasion than with this terrifying live action parody of Wallace and Gromit from 1995’s ‘The Lenny Henry Christmas Show’? The lovable, charming duos of Wallace and Gromit have gone from England’s most lovable couple into inter-dimensional abominations wearing skinned flesh in an attempt to blend in with humanity and their canine companions. It’s so grotesque, so horrifying, that at 0:51 in the clip, you can just faintly hear someone in the audience groaning, ‘Oh god…’ I don’t know who this man is or anything about him – and he’s not even a background character, per se – but he sums up the audience’s feelings so perfectly that he becomes the best thing about this sketch, stealing the show from the two things that will haunt my nightmares forever more.