Plenty of villains to choose from in the Star Wars sestet,
but I'll take Palpatine, who represents political and
martial power at its most toxic. McDiarmid was aboard for
four of the six films; his first was Return of the Jedi
when, 22 years before Sith was shot, he played Palpatine as
23 years older! (He also made a digital cameo in The Empire
Strikes Back.) One of the major British stage actors of the
past few decades, McDiarmid is a weary-looking man with a
magnificent vocal instrument. He uses this honeyed voice to
pour poison into the ear of Anakin Skywalker and turn the
ambitious Jedi into Darth Vader. Most seductively, most
repellently, Palpatine does what a movie villain must do:
convince the characters he is corrupting, and the audience
in the theater, that evil is both plausible and essential,
iberating and enthralling.