Don’t make Christoph Waltz a Bond villain: How Hollywood mis-typecast one of the best actors out there — salon.com

Today, news broke that Christoph Waltz would be costarring in the 24th Bond movie, “Spectre,” and it has been rumored that he’ll be playing the antagonist, possibly reprising the role of the classic, kitty-stroking Bond supervillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld. At first pass, this sounds great. Who is better at being dastardly than Christoph Waltz? But when I heard the news, I couldn’t help but groan. Since his breakout Oscar winning performance as Nazi Colonel Hans Landa in “Inglourious Basterds,” Waltz has been the baddie (or at least a bad dude) in seven out of nine of the films he has starred in (not counting “Muppets Most Wanted,”  in which he cameos as himself). There’s some range to this villainy: he played a paranoid Russian gangster in “The Green Hornet,” a sadistic circus owner in “Water For Elephants,” a brutal corporate lawyer in “Carnage,” an art world fraud in “Big Eyes,” a sleazy investor in “Horrible Bosses”… you get the point. He was even a villain in his lone cartoon role, as Mandrake in “Epic.” And as great as Waltz is in these parts, this relentless stream of evildoers has started to feel a bit like a misuse of Waltz’s many talents.

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