3) Daniel Craig – Layer Cake (2004)
“Life is so fucking good I can taste it in my spit,” declares Daniel Craig’s cocksure drug dealer in the electrical opening narration to Matthew Vaughn’s convoluted West London crime thriller. That’s just a taste of the character’s brazen and whip-smart outlook on life. A cocaine dealer (or “businessman,” as he refers to himself), the character is alternately charming and reprehensible, sincere and conniving, a smarter-than-average criminal stumped by the sheer unpredictability of his cretinous associates. It’s a tribute to Craig’s terrific performance that one can simultaneously love and hate the guy, as he schemes to retire from the criminal underworld with all his fingers intact.
While his witless associates are known by monickers like The Duke and Tiptoes, the protagonist is only ever identified as XXXX in credits and closed captioning. To him, anonymity is a potent weapon if wielded correctly, and so he moves like a chameleon through the criminal underworld, always cautious of becoming too well known, even to his closest partners. As he orchestrates a complex series of deadly double-crosses, XXXX is painstakingly careful never to get to close to anything, instead pulling all the strings from a (seemingly) safe distance.
XXXX is widely credited as the role that got Craig the role of James Bond in Casino Royale, and it’s not hard to see why. Suave and internally unflappable, XXXX is a bizarre inverse of the secret agent, a street-smart criminal with a strong dislike of guns and super-inflated sense of self.
The character’s witty, smarmy irreverence, certainly the main reason he ranks so highly on this list, is best summed up with this tragicomic, fourth-wall-shattering final jab at the audience: “My name? If you knew that, you’d be as clever as me.”