Before he gained internet stardom as a fearless dancer, and before he was tasked by the Russian foreign ministry with strengthening ties with the US, Steven Seagal was known to most people as just a plain old badass action star. He's starred in over fifty movies since his big screen debut in 1988 and, if you weren't aware, he's got more than a few classics under his black belt.
The former dojo owner has been a major face in the world of martial arts across the US, and the world, for over forty years. He's put those skills to good use in the rough and tumble world of machismo action movies, creating some legendary characters along the way. Here's our ranking of Steven Seagal's ten most badass characters.
Nico Toscani (Above the Law)
Seagal’s first starring role, Nico Toscani clearly defines the basic part that Seagal would go on to play in pretty much every movie he’s ever starred in.
To play Steven Seagal character bingo, you only need to follow the basic rules set up by Above the Law. Your main squares will consist of: “Vietnam Veteran”, “Detective with a New Partner”, “Former Best-of-the-Best Special Forces”, “Moral Infallibility”, “Superhuman Strength” and “Likes to Give Sanctimonious Speeches”. You won’t always get a full house but you can make a safe bet on getting at least four of those traits no matter which movie you’re watching.
John Hatcher (Marked for Death)
While still ex-army and ex-DEA, John Hatcher is practically a believable everyday schmo compared to the vast majority of Seagal’s other characters. He’s almost vulnerable. While he dispatches every single bad guy without taking a scratch, he can be seen to struggle at times. There are moments in Marked for Death that you could even go so far as to call close scrapes for Seagal.
It’s hard to describe Steven Seagal’s fighting style to anyone who hasn’t seen it before. He essentially just walks through most people. Giving him a worthy antagonist, in the form of Basil Wallace’s magical supervillain "Screwface", helps make John Hatcher a more memorable Seagal hard case.
Jack Cole (The Glimmer Man)
Jack Cole is a Buddhist police officer who kills multiple people by slitting their throats using a killer credit card with a blade hidden in it, so he's clearly quite a conflicted character. Before becoming a cop, Jack was a near-mystical ex-government assassin type who was once known as ‘The Glimmer Man" due to his victims only seeing a glimmer before they died.
Referred to in the movie as “Bruce Lee, only better”, Cole's badass quality, that sets him apart from the rest, is actually his brassily flamboyant dress sense. Jack is the kind of character who knows how to look good when tracking down a vicious serial killer and he’s not afraid to let the world know it. There’s a unique kind of bravery in that.
Gino Felino (Out for Justice)
When New York detective Gino Felino’s partner is gunned down in broad daylight, he takes it about as well as you’d expect for a Steven Seagal character. Gino isn’t the first in a line of Seagal characters that lean heavily on Italian heritage (even though Seagal doesn’t have any). But, as you may have been able to tell from the name, he is the most… shall we say… colorful.
Gino is kind of like a Frank Reynolds fantasy from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Not only is the man in a constant state of being comedically New Yorker-ish, he’s essentially psychotic at times. This was far from being Seagal’s first rodeo but most of the time Gino is so brutal, compared to most of Seagal's other performances, that he looks like he’s actually hurting the stunt actors in real life.
Mason Storm (Hard to Kill)
Mason Storm may not be amongst the crème de la crème of Steven Seagal’s movie characters in terms of sheer badassery but the Los Angeles police detective is the most enjoyably over the top of his early characters. (If the name Mason Storm didn't already give that away.)
Mason is the kind of character who the movie goes out of its way for, just so it can explicitly tell the audience how well endowed he is. He’s the kind of person who angrily says things like “I’m gonna take you to the bank, Senator Trent… the blood bank” to a TV screen when there’s no one actually in the room with him. He’s probably Seagal’s most hilariously badass character. Kind of like McBane from The Simpsons, only somehow less believable.
Forrest Taft (On Deadly Ground)
We could describe Seagal's character, oil rig firefighter/martial artist/environmental warrior Forrest Taft, from On Deadly Ground. Or we could just let R. Lee Ermey's character do it:
“My guy in DC tells me that we are not dealing with a student here, we’re dealing with the professor. Any time the military has an operation that can’t fail, they call this guy in to train the troops. Okay? He’s the kind of guy who would drink a gallon of gasoline so he could piss in your campfire. You could drop this guy off at the Arctic circle, wearing a pair of bikini underwear, without his toothbrush and tomorrow afternoon he’s gonna show up at your poolside with a million dollar smile and a fistful of pesos.” We’re not entirely sure what that last part means but we get the gist.
Jack Taggert (Fire Down Below)
Jack Taggert is a snake wranglin’, sharp-shootin', guitar-playin' son of a gun and potentially the coolest EPA agent to ever feature in a movie. Jack is the kind of guy who punches henchmen with such unmatched power that they actually exclaim that they’ve never been hit so hard before in their lives.
On his route to taking down a powerful company that’s dumping toxic waste in the Kentucky hills, Jack finds the time to fix the locals’ porches and roofs for free. He finds the most ostracized member of the community and decides to win her heart as a gentleman. Few action heroes can claim that they’ve ever made waltzing look badass. You could call him toned down for Seagal but, compared to someone like Gino, that's not a bad thing when it comes to likability.
Orin Boyd (Exit Wounds)
Detective Orin Boyd is the poster child for stereotypical action movie cops. He’s clearly shown to be the definition of ‘a loose cannon’. He’s a personal blight on the lives of his commanding officers. He blows a helicopter out of the sky with only a handgun. He single-handedly saves the Vice President from a group of heavily armed terrorists – and that’s just the first six minutes of the movie.
Orin Boyd isn’t just your usual flavor of Steven Seagal’s brand of invincible, he’s comic book superhuman. He leaps over a car, speeding directly towards him, in a single bound. He even prevents a helicopter from taking off by holding it back with his bare hands – a whopping fifteen years before Captain America did it too.
Casey Ryback (Under Siege & Under Siege 2)
Casey Ryback is probably the most famous character of Seagal’s entire career. The original Under Siege was the most that the mainstream movie world ever embraced Seagal and it became his only Oscar-nominated movie to date. (A title it’s likely to always hold.)
The ex-Navy SEAL turned cook is the quintessential Steven Seagal wisecracker. He’s the kind of man who’ll punch an officer right in the face for spitting in his soup. Couple this with his one-man-army approach to taking out literal boatloads – and trainloads – of armed goons and it's no wonder how the character brought Seagal the closest he ever came to the star power of Bruce Willis.
Lt. Colonel Austin Travis (Executive Decision)
Executive Decision is quite unusual for a Steven Seagal movie but that’s mostly because Steven Seagal isn’t really in it. He’s built up as his usual kind of flawless special forces soldier, he gets a dream team of '90s action movie actors and he’s leading the charge to save a hijacked plane full of civilians. Everything seems normal up until the moment when the movie busts out its big twist.
Right at the beginning of the mission, Travis and his team must covertly infiltrate the plane in mid-air via a pressurized seal attached to a stealth jet. But a series of mistakes and bad luck results in the seal becoming unstable. Without hesitation, Travis makes the decision to seal the hatch from the outside before it destroys both planes and he's blown out to his death. To this day, it remains as not just the most badass move of Seagal's career but also one of the most badass moves in the history of action movies.