In the 1940s, Michael Shannon would have been cast as a heavy in noir and gangster films thanks to his furrowed brow and lifeless eyes. But there's a soulfulness beneath his prominent features, and because of that. Shannon has come to inhabit villains that are a little bit human, and humans that are a little bit villainous.
He's as comfortable playing figures of altruistic authority, like Federal Agent Nelson Van Alden in HBO's Boardwalk Empire, as he is telling quaking humans to "Kneel before Zod!" in Man of Steel. The proof of that is in his Academy Award nominations for both the righteous Sheriff Bobby Andes in Nocturnal Animals and the corrupt Agent Richard Strickland in The Shape of Water. Shannon has the ability to give both explosive performances and nuanced character studies, whether he's playing heroes or villains.
DAVE KARNES (WORLD TRADE CENTER)
Shannon's character in World Trade Center was based on the real David W. Karnes, a former United States Marine who helped fellow Marine Jason Thomas rescue two real police officers trapped in the rubble of the World Trade Center Towers following the September 11 attacks.
The film (directed by Oliver Stone) stays tightly focused on the two officers (played by Michael Peña and Nicolas Cage) and their struggle to remain alive until first responders can pull them from the rubble. As Karnes, Shannon is unquestionably heroic, but not because he intended to be so, but because the real Karnes saw a job that needed to be done and did it to the best of his abilities.
BOBBY ANDES (NOCTURNAL ANIMALS)
There are many phenomenal performances in Nocturnal Animals, a murder mystery which includes the talents of Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams, but it's Michael Shannon who shines brightest as Sheriff Bobby Andes, the Southwest lawman who helps Gyllenhaal's character track down his family's murderers.
Sheriff Andes is the sort of tough-talking, no-nonsense officer who appears at first highly suspicious of the lone man who stumbles out of the desert claiming his family was murdered, but over the course of the film becomes his closest ally and fiercest advocate. Andes even gets his own emotional arc, played with restraint by Shannon.
GARY NOESNER (WACO)
In the gripping miniseries Waco, Michael Shannon plays FBI agent Gary Noesner, who works with the ATF to apprehend religious zealot David Koresh from his Branch Davidian compound located in Waco, Texas in 1993. After a misguided discharge of weapons in a botched raid by the ATF, a standoff ensues between them and the worshipers inside.
Over the course of the taut running time, Noesner, who favors peaceful negotiation tactics, becomes frustrated with the aggressive military strategies of the Hostage Rescue Team. Shannon does an excellent job of conveying the shame and despair of the agents in the field who walked away from the tragic event knowing that civilians had lost faith in law enforcement and the bureau.
NELSON VAN ALDEN (BOARDWALK EMPIRE)
A federal agent working in the time of Prohibition, Boardwalk Empire's Nelson Van Alden is an incredibly devout man whose moral compass is dictated by scripture and a deep sense of condemnation for anything associated with "fun."
Van Alden prowls the infamous boardwalk of Atlantic City — a hub of debauchery from the 1870s to the 1930s) — with self-aggrandizing menace, looking for speakeasies to raid and gangsters to bust. Shannon manages to imbue Van Alden with his own flaws and therefore his own humanity. He's often no better than the riffraff he books.
PETER EVANS (BUG)
In the indie thriller Bug, based on the Tracy Letts play of the same name, Shannon portrays Peter Evans, a drifter who passes through a motel one night and develops a relationship with one of its long-standing guests (played by Ashley Judd). Their romance is a great deal more tender than what she had with her abusive ex-husband, but soon she realizes Peter may not be who he seems.
Shannon also portrayed the character of Evans during Bug's theatrical run, and seems comfortable in the role, which demands him to plot an emotional trajectory from polite loner to paranoid schizophrenic.
RICK CARVER (99 HOMES)
In 99 Homes, a single father (Andrew Garfield) finds his home foreclosed on and his family forced to live in a motel, he begrudgingly begins working for Rick Carver (Shannon), the very real estate broker who put him out on the streets.
Carver is the Gordon Gecko of real estate — a smooth operator who shows how appealing screwing people over can be. He is involved in all sorts of scams involving banks and the federal government, and seems to prove by his very existence that honest work will never get you far.
CAPTAIN BEATTY (FAHRENHEIT 451)
In the HBO film based on Ray Bradbury's famous novel Fahrenheit 451, a firefighter named Guy Montag (Michael B. Jordan) burns books in a future where such an act by the government is done to promote harmonious living, under the watchful eye of the militant Captain Beatty.
Though the film wasn't well received, no one would fault Shannon's interpretation of Captain Beatty, a classic literary villain, portrayed with equal parts menace and spirited conviction.
RICHARD STRICKLAND (THE SHAPE OF WATER)
In Guillermo del Toro's masterpiece The Shape of Water, a young cleaning woman at a top secret research facility becomes entranced by its most recent arrival — a humanoid amphibian creature taken from the Amazon to be experimented on by the government.
As Richard Strickland, the man overseeing the experiments, Shannon is at his most charming and duplicitous. Strickland may bundle his nuclear family into a shiny teal Cadillac, but beneath his Stepford exterior, he is a ruthless mercenary. He wears a mask of ambition, hiding his crippling doubt, which when left unaddressed becomes the source of his most dangerous actions.
RICHARD KUKLINSKI (THE ICEMAN)
Rarely have all of Shannon's talents come together so seamlessly than in The Iceman, where as Richard Kuklinski, he is both a loving father and a serial killer. Based on a true story, the film tracks his two parallel lives, one which focuses on his career as a professional hitman, the other on his life as a family man.
Shannon is all clenched teeth and dead eyes in this film, with plenty of opportunities to explode out of the depths of his "icy" calm. He is careful to show how the circumstances Kuklinski finds himself in contribute to him becoming "the devil himself," responsible for 200 gruesome murders.
GENERAL ZOD (MAN OF STEEL)
Even when Shannon is asked to portray villains as dyed-in-the-wool as General Zod in Man of Steel, he finds ways to make their cruelty and malevolence seem rooted in their humanity. Zod is not a one-dimensional brute bent on destroying Earth and Superman; he's an impassioned warlord seeking justice for his destroyed planet.
In his final speech at the end of the film, Zod accuses Superman of choosing humans over his own people, and proclaims himself a protector of Krypton even as he prepares to be a destroyer of Earth. Like Marvel's Thanos, Zod is not a completely cut-and-dry villain, and manages to garner glimmers of sympathy even as he stands a mass murderer.