6 Of The Best Scene-Stealing Supporting Characters in Cinema

A great supporting character can elevate the movie around them, make a bad one worth seeing, or simply add a little extra spice to an already great ensemble.

What they can’t do, at least for this rundown of my personal favourites, is take up too much narrative space or screentime: so don’t expect the likes of Han Solo, say, or Miranda Priestley, or Heath Ledger’s Joker to appear — to name just a few. A good recent example could have been Jeremy Strong’s turn as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning, although the former Kendall Roy just isn’t given enough scenes to chew on in Aaron Sorkin’s latest movie. A better one would be Ike Barinholtz’s upcoming turn as Elon Musk in Artificial, but we’ll wait until that one’s out before going any deeper on it. 

Additionally, although it was tempting to only include villains — who are more scene-stealing by nature — I decided it was best to spread the love a bit. In any case, here are some of our favourite scene-stealing supporting characters in movies.

Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs)

If you’re thinking that we’ve broken every rule by including Hannibal Lector from The Silence of the Lambs (a role which won Anthony Hopkins the Oscar for Best Actor), it’s always good to remember that the character only appeared in four proper scenes, or roughly 16 of the movie’s 158 minutes.

That most people still agree that that Oscar win was the correct decision says all you need to know about the impact Hopkins’ performance had on Jonathan Demme’s masterpiece; how charged the entire thing became whenever he entered the frame. 

As scene-stealing supporting characters go, they simply don’t get much better than this. 

Freddy Miles (The Talented Mr. Ripley)

A blood red Alfa Romeo pulls up to a Roman piazza. A man jumps out and saunters across the street, rattling off an immortal line (“Don’t you just wanna [bleep] every woman you see just once”) before kissing Jude Law on each cheek and downing a glass of champagne.

This is how Freddy Miles (Philip Seymour Hoffman) makes his presence felt in The Talented Mr. Ripley; in other words, with one of the greatest character entrances of all time. 

For a measure of Hoffman’s remarkable scene-stealing in Anthony Minghella’s decadent, Amalfi coast thriller, just think for a moment how Freddy, the fourth most important character by some distance, almost threatens to take the movie away from Matt Damon, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow — who collectively or otherwise have never looked better on-screen. 

Now that’s impact.

Sergeant Dignam (The Departed)

If Martin Scorsese says that he’s directing a movie about cops and mobsters set in the loudest city in the United States, don’t be surprised when most of the cast take it upon themselves to chew up the scenery. 

The Departed — a movie that which the mole v mole action of the Hong Kong classic Infernal Affairs and landed it in Boston, Massachusetts — features a handful of performances that would be worthy contenders for this list, not least Jack Nicholson’s wild-eyed turn as Frank Costello or Alec Baldwin’s Glengarry-redux as Captain Ellerby. The fact that Mark Wahlberg outshines and, crucially, out-Bostons them, is a testament to the incredible level of scene-stealing that he achieves. 

As Sergeant Dignam, Wahlberg spends the majority of the movie perched beside Capt. Queenan’s desk (in a classic good cop-bad cop combo), barely affecting the central narrative in a meaningful way until the movie’s coda. What he does do, however, is rile up Leo DiCaprio’s William Costigan with a barrage of eternal put downs: all “laced curtains” this, dropped “R”s that, and so many glorious f-bombs. 

Captain Koons (Pulp Fiction)

Quentin Tarantino has famously never won Best Director at the Oscars. Instead, the categories that his movies tend to dominate are for screenplays and supporting performances — the latter of which has resulted in three wins from four nominations in his last four movies alone.

All of which is to say that QT knows a thing or two about writing and casting scene-stealing roles, and while we could have easily considered any number of them from his nine features to date, it’s hard to look past the one-scene-wonder that is Christopher Walken’s Capt. Koons from Pulp Fiction.

Appearing for what is essentially a single, four-minute monologue about the storied journey of Butch’s father’s watch, Walken left an indelible footprint on Tarantino’s 1994 classic, creating a character so scene-stealing that the director’s biggest (or most insufferable, depending on your tastes) fans still pride themselves on being able to quote the speech verbatim.

Megan Price (Bridesmaids)

Sometimes I wonder if Bridesmaids — arguably the funniest movie of the Apatow era — gets the credit it deserves these days. The story follows a struggling baker named Annie as she tries and fails to give her old friend Lillian a thoughtful pre-wedding experience — only to discover, heartbreakingly, that her friend has moved on to a less thrifty stage of life.

From that juicy setup, Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph (old pals themselves from SNL) deliver buckets of pathos and humour in the lead roles, but the best laughs come from their supporting players: namely Ellie Kemper’s Becca, Rebel Wilson’s Brynn, and the force of nature that is Melissa McCarthy’s Megan.

Megan only appears on-screen for less than 20 minutes, but it was enough to earn McCarthy an Oscar nomination for her efforts — a rare honour for any comedic performance, let alone one that included a key scene involving explosive diarrhoea. 

Let’s see you do that, Daniel Day-Lewis…

Mark Hanna (The Wolf of Wall Street)

We are allowing ourselves to include two Scorsese movies on this list because Marty is the GOAT and Matthew McConaughey’s Mark Hanna in The Wolf of Wall Street is the platonic ideal of a scene stealer. 

Here is a guy who appears for one scene within the first 15 minutes of a bombastic three-hour-long movie, yet what he does with it is not only unforgettable, it basically provides the entire thesis of the movie.

Add to that McConaughey’s improvised whistles and chest-thumping chants and you leave with a scene-stealing character for the ages. It was telling that, when the movie came out, Hanna was the character who everyone wanted to talk about.