40 Most Hated Characters on Screen and Paper

Characters can make or break a story. When they’re written well, they can evoke the most powerful emotions from the reader.

There’s nothing more joyous than finding a character who you love, whether it’s on the screen or on the pages of a book— except maybe finding a character you hate with such passion that it seems crazy.

There are characters who will rub you wrong way. There are those who are gleefully evil that you’ll drink up every narrative they’re in. And then there are characters who are universally, and almost irrationally loathed.

There’s going to be a few spoilers in this list, so watch out!

Most Hated Film and TV Characters

Listed below are the most maddening, punchable, and all-around hated characters that have appeared on the big screen, from film to tv.

1. Joffrey Baratheon from Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones has a plethora of hated characters. Ramsey Bolton is evil. Cersei is cruel. Littlefinger is a manipulator. But Joffrey takes the cake as the most hated because not only is he cruel, but he’s also the penultimate brat with no ounce of competence. Every fan of the show probably cheered when he choked on poisoned wine.

2. Ryan Howard from The Office

It’s hard to choose who’s more horrible, Ryan or Andy the Nard Dog. But I’ve ultimately settled with Ryan. Why? Because Andy’s just a weird guy with questionable choices while Ryan’s a smug bastard who constantly looks down on people.

3. Chatur Ramalingam from 3 Idiots

Chatur is the ultimate stereotype of that one classmate you had who would hide notes, compete with you on who has the highest grades, claim they’ve never studied, and tattle to the teacher just so they’d remain on top. He also farts a lot.

4. Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother

There’s a lot to hate with Ted. He pursues women even though they’ve turned him down and jumps through hoops just to get their attention. And let’s not forget how, through the entire series, he searched for his one true love, found her, and married her, only to go back to the Robin when his wife died.

5. DeeDee from Dexter’s Laboratory

DeeDee’s the sibling you’ll never want to have. She’s loud, childish, hyper-active, and irritating. Plus she never did respect Dexter’s privacy, always getting into his lab and messing up his experiments.

6. Jar Jar Binks from the Star Wars prequels

Jar Jar was obviously created for comic relief, but fails so horribly with it. He’s got an annoying voice and grating personality that overshadows an already wooden cast of a clunky movie. He’s also quite the racist caricature of Jamaican Rastafarianism.

7. The Vulture from Brooklyn Nine-Nine

The Vulture is that one co-worker who’s too full of himself and never does any work, only to swoop in at the last minute and try to take credit for your hard work. Worse is that he’d rub it in your face too.

8. Scrappy-Doo from Scooby-Doo

Scrappy-Doo was introduced as an attempt to revive the Scooby-Doo series, but quickly turned into a nuisance. He’d throw himself into any danger only to get rescued by the gang. His actions only dragged out the story rather than adding to it.

His only redeeming appearance so far is when he’s revealed to be the villain in the 2002 live action movie.

9. Ned Flanders from The Simpsons

Ned Flanders started out as the annoying neighbor with an overly optimistic world view. He has since degraded into a character that thinks he’s better than the others just because of his religion. No wonder Homer wrote a song called “Everybody Hates Ned Flanders.”

10. Dawn Summers from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

No one asked for Dawn. Suddenly appearing as Buffy’s sister on season five is one thing, but having an entire season that seems to be about her is another. Dawn feels lonely. Dawn is hurt. Dawn is a key to another dimension yadah yadah. We’re looking for Buffy, only to get the annoying sister.

11. Janice Litman from Friends

Janice falls into that incredibly rare niche of lovable yet unlikeable characters. You’d laugh and smile whenever she appears and offsets the dynamic of the group but you’d still wish her incredibly nasal laugh wasn’t that prominent. It’s frustrating to our poor ears.

12. Miss Trunchbull from Matilda

Miss Trunchbull is harsh, haughty, and extremely tyrannical. As the principal of a school, you’d think she’d be a good educator, but she gets her kicks from terrorizing children, frequently locking them into a hole filled with sharp things, or pulling them by their pigtails and launching them into the air.

13. Anakin Skywalker from the Star Wars prequels

The most irritating thing that the prequels did was portray one of the greatest movie villains’ backstory as that of a whiny, angsty character that falls flat on the screen. The dialogue’s bad, the acting’s wooden, and everything’s just bland compared to the original trilogy’s Darth Vader.

14. Will Schuester from Glee

Will seems like the perfect teacher, but only at first. Throughout the series, he seems more concerned with projecting his dreams into the glee club, going so far as unnecessarily meddling with his students’ personal lives. He’s blackmailed Finn into choosing club activities and even suspended Marley for refusing to wear a bikini for a performance.

15. Terence Fletcher from Whiplash

Fletcher is a master of manipulation. He got Andrew, the protagonist, into being obsessed with playing the drums to the point that he neglects the other parts of his life. He’s a sadistic perfectionist who’s not above heaping physical and mental abuse on his students for his dream of finding the new musical greats.

16. Andrea Harrison from The Walking Dead

Andrea’s a very poor judge of character. She was only slightly annoying during the first two seasons. It was only during the third season that people really began hating her. She abandoned her friends without much thought when she was blinded by the Governor’s charm. And then there’s the time she shot Daryl, one of the most beloved characters in the series.

17. Bella Swan from Twilight

Many people disliked Edward Cullen, but people hate Bella Swan. As a lead character, you’d expect her to be the life of the story, but Bella ends up being so bland and dull that you’d rather focus on all the more interesting supporting characters than her.

18. Regina George from Mean Girls

Regina’s a villain straight from any teen’s nightmares. She’s beautiful and sexy but unfortunately has a rotten personality. Vain and cruel, she’ll compliment you to your face but degrade you when your back’s turned. She’s the ultimate mean girl who’s out to get anyone who’s a threat to her place at the top of the social pyramid.

19. Emperor Commodus from Gladiator

Marcus Aurelius lost the lottery when he had Commodus as a son. Incredibly twisted and power-hungry, Commodus stops at nothing to get what he wants, going so far as to murder his own father. The character has no redeeming qualities, never fighting with honor even to the last moment of the movie.

20. Meredith Blake from The Parent Trap

Meredith is the young, conniving bombshell who’s preventing Annie and Hallie from reuniting their family. She seduces the twins’ dad, Nick Parker, for his money and plans to send the twins to boarding school. What’s really frustrating with her is she’s not against fighting children to get her way.

Most Hated Book Characters

From villain archetypes to more complex characters, literature has its fair share of detested characters. A few of them have been adapted to the other forms of media too. Check them out below!

1. Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling

It says something about Umbridge when she’s the most hated character in a series with an outstanding villain like Voldemort. Unlike Voldy though, Umbridge has no plans for world domination. She’s just a mean, stuck-up teacher who always gets under your skin for every little reason.

2. Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Every character from Wuthering Heights was an awful person, but Heathcliff especially so. When Cathy was alive, both of them actively kept trying to ruin each other’s lives. Quite an odd thing, considering they were lovers.

After Cathy’s death, we see Heathcliff being an abusive ass to everyone—his family, his friends, even to himself. Seems like his love’s more about destruction than care.

3. Cholly Breedlove from The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Cholly is a terrible father, abusive husband, and violent alcoholic. He also burns down his family’s home, rapes his daughter, and flees, leaving her pregnant. We do get some insight on why he’s like this, but it doesn’t excuse all the horrible things he’s done.

4. Tom Buchanan from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby has a ton of unlikeable characters to pick from, but Tom Buchanan is undoubtedly the worst of them. Unlike the other characters who have reasons for their unlikability, Tom’s just a rich, racist brute who likes shoving his money onto people’s faces.

5. Humbert Humbert from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Humbert, under Nabokov’s hypnotic prose, is first seen as an intellectual and misunderstood character. But in his rambling defense of his predatory behavior you will see his true self— a manipulative, parasitic, and lying pedophile.

6. Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

Nurse Ratched is recognized as one of the most insidious villains in pop culture history. Cold, clinical, and condescending, she’s the perfect case of power being a corruptive influence. She doesn’t use violence to terrorize, but rather dehumanizes and demoralizes her patients under the illusion of helpfulness and good.

7. Albert from The Color Purple by Alice Walker

For most of the book, readers don’t know the name of the person who physically and psychologically abuses Celie for most of her life. He does nothing but keep her suppressed and neglected. Worse is that he encourages his own son to copy his ways with his own wife. He reforms at the end, but his actions so far have been horrible.

8. Patrick Bateman from American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

If you know someone who thinks that Patrick Bateman’s a misunderstood character, maybe it’s best to keep them at a distance. Despite his success, he feels extreme insecurity and self-hatred, which he uses as an excuse for murder, drugs, and even cannibalism. He kills just to feel good about himself.

9. Uriah Heep from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Uriah Heep is so much of a sycophant that his name has become synonymous to it. He’s a slimy kiss-ass who’d do anything to get into your good books, only to stab you in the back. Manipulative and full of malice, he’s one person you’d never want to be associated with.

10. Napoleon from Animal Farm by George Orwell

Napoleon is a stand-in for Joseph Stalin in the context of the book. He’s a ferocious boar who’s used to getting his way. Starting out as an animal out to overthrow a negligent and ineffective system, he soon turns into a dictator and slowly eliminates his allies while establishing a tyrannical system.

11. Scarlett O’Hara from Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Scarlett is a homewrecker. She’s got this tendency of destroying other girl’s budding relationships— just because she couldn’t get hers! Plus her deceit and selfishness are a lot to take in, and make it hard to justify most of the reasons for her actions in the book.

12. Mr. and Mrs. Samsa from The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

When Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself suddenly transformed as a bug, it’s only his sister Grete who shows him some sympathy. His parents though, only show contempt, with his father even throwing an apple that seriously injures Gregor.

Considering that Gregor’s the breadwinner of the family, it makes his parents more like monsters than the creature he’s turned into.

13. Hamlet from Hamlet by William Shakespeare

You could consider Hamlet as the classical equivalent of an emo. He’s always sulking and whining about his sorry life without doing much to change it for the better. Of course, the tragedies inflicted on him are to blame but his cruel treatment of Ophelia and the various mistakes he makes for the sake of vengeance are all his own.

14. Robert Langdon from the Robert Langdon series by Dan Brown

One of the biggest issues about Robert Langdon is how much of a Gary Stu he is. He’s a Harvard professor focusing on symbols and art history, yet seems to be knowledgeable and capable of almost anything. The guy can do no wrong, making him frustrating and boring to read.

15. Abigail Williams from The Crucible by Arthur Miller

In this fictionalized work about the Salem Witch trials, Abigail sets off a series of calculated lies that snowball into full mass hysteria as the people of Salem increasingly believe that witches are among them. And rather than face the consequences of her actions, she flees town instead, and with her uncle’s fortune, to boot.

17. The Joker from the DC Universe

Forget about Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix’s incredible performances for a moment. Consider the Joker as he is: a sociopath among sociopaths. He’s permanently crippled Barbara Gordon, then-acting Batgirl, and brutally killed the second Robin, Jason Todd. Those are just two of the biggest highlights of his long list of crimes.

18. Shou Tucker from Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa

Shou Tucker is responsible for one of the most heartless and tear-jerking moments in both the manga and its adaptations. His crime? Experimenting on his daughter and her dog, fusing them into one horrid creature. He’d probably remind you of Mengele. Poor Nina and Alexander.

19. Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

You either love him or hate him. Unfortunately, most people seem to prefer hating Holden. His extremely negative attitude and isolationism seem to repel a lot of readers. He’s also constantly whiny, which makes you want to scream “shut up” whenever you’re reading the book.

20. The Other Children from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl is said to have been a child-hater, which might have made it easy for him to write gluttonous Augustus Gloop, rude Violet Beauregard, tv-obsessed Mike TeeVee, and irritating Veruca Salt into this story. There’s a certain satisfaction to them having their comeuppance during the tour to Willy Wonka’s factory.

Effective Despicable Characters

To be fair, most of these characters were written to be hated, and we do love to hate them, don’t we? It’s a “love to hate” sort of relationship.

It’s a testament to a writer’s skill when they can make a reader hate a character with all of their being. When a fictional character can affect you so much, it shows how real and believable they’re written.

When your blood’s boiling, you’ll know you’re in for one hell of a ride with the stories you’re currently exploring.

Who is one character you love to hate? Share them in the comments below!

If you enjoyed this post, then you might also like:

The post 40 Most Hated Characters on Screen and Paper appeared first on TCK Publishing.