In a big-budget Hollywood movie, producers pay big bucks for a big-name actor in order to get North Americans' big asses into cinema seats: hence the careers of John Travolta and Sylvester Stallone. It is an unspoken truth, though, that what really drives the plots of these movies are their compelling villains -- but since the villains can't overshadow the heroes on the marquee, producers must cast no-name actors who can actually act. Didn't we all root harder for Alan Rickman's charismatic Hans Gruber than we did for Bruce Willis's generic John McClane in Die Hard? Of course we did.

But what can a producer do when he needs to hire a no-name actor who can actually act and doesn't speak with a foreign accent? Simple: Hire a Canadian. Fametracker presents a sampling of our favourite Canadian villains.

Colm Feore

Bald thespian dynamo Colm Feore is a veteran of the stage at Ontario's Stratford Festival, having played such challenging Shakespearean roles as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. Feore also played the title role in the acclaimed Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould, a colleague of the title character's in Bethune, and a painter's mentor in Artemisia -- all in Canada. The man has shown that he has considerable range, which is why, we suppose, he's been drafted by the American studios to be evil. With his chiselled cheekbones and sleek, bald, inscrutable looks, he made a truly chilling superhuman villain André Linoge in the mini-series Stephen King's Storm of the Century. Because American audiences had never seen him before -- unless they were paying very close attention in Face/Off and City of Angels -- they could believe that he could control the weather to the detriment of a small village off the coast of Maine. After all, everyone knows that Canadians have a talent for withstanding harsh weather.

Henry Czerny

Proving what a very small arts community exists in Canada, Henry Czerny played Lucentio to Colm Feore's Petruchio in a 1988 production of The Taming of the Shrew. Unlike Feore, however, even Czerny's most memorable Canadian roles have him acting as a very bad man indeed. Czerny is known for playing the pedophilic Brother Lavin who terrorizes and molests his orphan charges in The Boys of St. Vincent, and the homophobic seminary professor in When Night is Falling, although he also played -- for instance -- Mr. Margaret Sanger in a TV movie based on the Planned Parenthood founder's life. When Czerny got the call to come down to Hollywood, it was to play corrupt CIA official Ritter in Clear and Present Danger, foiling Harrison Ford's heroic Jack Ryan. Czerny's pompous but otherwise unremarkable good looks and proven capacity for on-screen evil won him a very (some would say "eerily") similar role foiling Tom Cruise's heroic Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible. While Czerny is perfectly convincing as the sexual predator of St. Vincent, he's more at home circulating damning memos than molesting little boys.

Donald Sutherland

Donald Sutherland bucked evil-Canadian-actor tradition by playing a wide range of characters in Hollywood throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s -- from Homer Simpson (not that one) in Day of the Locust to Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H to the title role in Klute to the bereaved father in Ordinary People. Then came his pivotal role in JFK as X, the nameless government operative who clues Jim Garrison in to the government conspiracy behind the assassination; since then, Donald Sutherland's face in a movie is shorthand for E-V-I-L. In The Puppet Masters, Outbreak, Virus, and many more, Donald Sutherland's black, black heart causes the death or destruction of everyone around him. Sure, he did Six Degrees of Separation and Without Limits just to throw us off the trail, but Fametracker knows better; Donald Sutherland's cold blue eyes and icy tone work best when they're bringing to life a character with no conscience, and no soul. He's even convinced us, through his voice-overs, that driving a Volvo will only steer us down the Highway to Hell.