Guy Ritchie made RocknRolla in 2008, between the two films that nearly ended his career and the Sherlock Holmes franchise that rescued it, and almost nobody talks about it now. That is a little unfair to a movie that went straight to number one in the UK on its opening weekend, but the numbers explain the memory. It took roughly $25.7 million worldwide against an $18 million budget, which is a modest return rather than a flop, and it sits a long way short of the $83 million Snatch had managed eight years earlier. Reviews landed somewhere in the middle. Ritchie left a title card promising a sequel called The Real RocknRolla and never delivered it. It was a Warner Bros. release, and reviewers largely treated it as a return to form rather than a triumph. What nobody was in a position to notice in 2008 is that he had accidentally assembled one of the most comic-book-loaded casts of the decade.
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Not comic-book actors generally. Villains specifically. Four people in that cast have played the primary antagonist of a Marvel or DC film, and a fifth spent the picture as a London crime boss three years after playing Gotham’s. Idris Elba is the name on the poster of this piece because he was in it too, as a laconic fixer called Mumbles, three years before he turned up on the Bifrost in Thor. That is the accurate version of the timeline and it is worth stating carefully, because Thor was not actually his first comic-book film either. But Elba is the least villainous person in the room. The interesting part is everyone standing around him, because Ritchie hired them for a scruffy London crime caper and Hollywood spent the next decade handing them capes to fight. The tally runs to Bane, Doctor Doom, Doctor Sivana and Carmine Falcone, which is a deeper villain bench than most superhero films manage to field on their own.
The Cast Ritchie Put Together in 2008 Had No Idea What It Was Sitting On
The lineup is genuinely strange in hindsight. Gerard Butler and Tom Wilkinson take top billing as a small-time thief and the old-school gangster squeezing him. Thandiwe Newton is the accountant running a scheme past both of them. Mark Strong narrates as Archy, Wilkinson’s right hand. Tom Hardy plays Handsome Bob, Toby Kebbell plays a rock star called Johnny Quid who has faked his own death, Karel Roden is a Russian oligarch, Jeremy Piven and Ludacris are a pair of American music executives, and Elba is Mumbles. Jason Statham was wanted and could not make the dates, which is the only reason the film does not have a fourth Ritchie regular in it.
In 2008 exactly one of those people had a comic-book credit worth mentioning, and it was not the one anybody would guess. Everything else on this list happened afterward, across four different studios and two rival publishers, with no coordination between any of them. That is what makes the cast list worth pulling up rather than just another round of actor trivia. Nobody was building a bench here. Ritchie was casting a film about a stolen painting and a corrupt property deal, and the people he picked happened to be the exact actors Hollywood would reach for when it needed someone to menace a superhero.
Tom Hardy and Toby Kebbell Went On to Play Two of the Decade’s Biggest Comic Villains
Hardy is the clearest case. Four years after playing a gangster with an unrequited crush on Butler’s character, he was Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, the primary antagonist of the most-watched superhero trilogy ever made, breaking Batman’s back in a film that took over a billion dollars. He later played Eddie Brock in Venom, though that one needs a caveat the internet routinely skips: Venom is a Sony production, explicitly not part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the character is written as an antihero rather than a straight villain. Bane is the credit that counts here, and Bane is about as unambiguous as comic-book villainy gets.
Kebbell’s turn came in 2015, and it went considerably worse. He played Victor Von Doom in the Fantastic Four reboot, the primary antagonist, in a film that grossed $168 million against a $120 million budget, earned a C-minus from exit polling and collected multiple Razzie nominations including Worst Picture. Kebbell has been candid since about how the character ended up on screen. None of that changes the fact of it. Seven years after playing a drug-addled rock star faking his own death in a Guy Ritchie film, he was playing Marvel’s most famous villain, and he is the only member of this cast to have led a Marvel movie’s antagonist role outright.
Mark Strong Needed Three Attempts, and the Mob Boss Had Already Done It
Strong’s comic-book record is the most tangled of anyone here, and it is worth getting right because it usually gets told wrong. He played Sinestro in Green Lantern in 2011, and Sinestro is not the villain of that film. He is Hal Jordan’s mentor, the antagonist is Parallax, and the famous heel turn happens in a mid-credits scene setting up a sequel nobody ever made. The genuine credit came eight years later, when he played Doctor Thaddeus Sivana in Shazam!, who is unambiguously the villain, and who remains the least-discussed of the three comic antagonists to come out of this cast.
He had also played Frank D’Amico in Kick-Ass the year before Green Lantern, a mob boss in a comic that Marvel published without it ever being a Marvel superhero property, which is the sort of technicality that gets a piece taken apart if you count it without saying so. Strung together, the record reads less like a run of comic-book villain roles than a run of casting directors independently deciding that Mark Strong is the most interesting threat available. Three swings at it across nine years, at two different studios, and only one of them put him in the part people actually remember him for.
Then there is Tom Wilkinson, who reverses the direction entirely. He plays Lenny Cole in RocknRolla, the old-school London crime boss holding the whole plot by the throat, and he had already played Carmine Falcone in Batman Begins three years earlier. Falcone is Gotham’s ranking mafia boss, the man who has Bruce Wayne’s parents’ killer murdered and who goes into business smuggling Scarecrow’s fear toxin into the city. So Ritchie’s mob boss was Gotham’s mob boss first, which is either a coincidence or a very efficient piece of casting shorthand, and the film never draws attention to it, because in 2008 there was nothing yet to draw attention to.
Why This Keeps Happening, and the Sequel Ritchie Never Made
There is a deflating explanation available, and the piece is better for admitting it. Roger Ebert put it best in his own review of this film, observing that British actors love playing gangsters roughly as much as American actors love playing cowboys. A mid-2000s London crime ensemble is drawing from a fairly small pool of character actors who are good at being quietly frightening, and that is the same pool the superhero industry started dredging the moment it needed antagonists with gravity. Christopher Nolan built most of Inception out of the same instinct two years later, casting Hardy alongside Cillian Murphy, who had already played Scarecrow, and Marion Cotillard, who would shortly play Talia al Ghul.
The difference is that Inception was deliberate. Nolan was reusing actors he had already worked with and would work with again, assembling a repertory company in plain sight. Ritchie had no such plan and no such bench. He was casting a film about a stolen painting, a crooked property deal and a rock star faking his own death, and the overlap with the superhero industry arrived years afterward and entirely from outside. That is the distinction that makes this cast list an accident worth pointing at rather than a pattern somebody designed, and it is also the reason nobody noticed at the time, including the people in it.
Elba’s own trajectory deserves one correction, because the easy version of it is wrong. RocknRolla came out three years before Thor, so it does predate the MCU. It does not predate his comic-book career. He played Captain William Roque in The Losers in April 2010, a full year before Heimdall, adapting a title from DC’s Vertigo imprint. He later played Bloodsport in The Suicide Squad, which is a DC role but an antihero one, and Heimdall was a hero throughout. Of everyone in this cast who went on to comic-book films, the man who is now the biggest star among them is the one who never actually played a villain.
As for the sequel, the film ends on a title card promising that Johnny, Archy and the Wild Bunch will return in The Real RocknRolla. Thandiwe Newton said at the time that Ritchie was hoping for a trilogy. By 2011 he had written a script and had a producer willing to fund it, telling one interviewer that the problem was simply time, and that while Warner Bros. kept handing him Sherlock Holmes films it might not happen soon. It never did. The closest thing to it turned up in The Gentlemen, and the cast Ritchie assembled for the original scattered into other people’s franchises instead, mostly to lose fights to superheroes.
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