Not to give too much away, but beloved English starlette Emily Blunt doesn’t play the most sympathetic of characters in the forthcoming The Girl on the Train… Which got us thinking, what other nice girls have thrown away their halo for the movies? This is our list of our favourite good girls gone bad...
Rebecca De Mornay, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle
In the 1980s Rebecca De Mornay was the archetypal girl-next-door. Even when she played a call girl (like in the Tom Cruise-starrer Risky Business), she was so innocent and likeable that it never really occurred to us that she actually Charges For Sex. Then, in 1992, she bamboozled moviegoers with an electrifying turn as a psychopathic nanny in this nail-shredding chiller. Her performance was so memorable that she won an MTV Movie Award for Best Villain that year. Go, Becs!
Rachel McAdams, Mean Girls
For most of her career, Rachel McAdams has played women who you’d like to hang out and shoot the breeze with. From Allie Hamilton in The Notebook to Claire in The Time-Traveller’s Wife to ace reporter Sacha Pfeiffer in the Oscar winning Spotlight, McAdams has cornered the market in likeable female leads. But cast your mind back to her big movie break as the high-school-bitch-from-hell Regina George in the teen comedy classic Mean Girls. In a film full of mean girls, she’s by far the meanest, a 24-carat she-devil with poison coursing through her veins.
Margaret Hamilton, The Wizard of Oz
By all accounts Margaret Hamilton, who played the dastardly Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz, was an incredibly warm and kind human being. Before her breakthrough role as the Wicked Witch (and her real-world counterpart Miss Almira Gulch), she was mostly known for matronly roles (despite only being in her thirties), and so she was initially quite shocked at being offered the part of the movie's Big Bad. When asked about The Wizard of Oz, Hamilton said her biggest fear was that the role would give children the wrong idea of who she really was.
Sarah Michelle Gellar, Cruel Intentions
In the 1990s she was Buffy Summers, the vampire-slaying lead of Joss Whedon’s cult fave Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but in 1999 she shocked her fans by starring (with a new dark brown hair dye job) as uber-bitch Kathryn Merteuil in Cruel Intentions. This is a character who managed to convince the world that she was a virtuous saint with eyes only for Jesus, but in reality was a scheming manipulator that would stop at nothing to get what she wanted. And – what do ya know? – Gellar is bringing back the character in 2017 for a TV spin-off. The bitch is back.
Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl
Okay, spoilers ahead. For the first half of the Gone Girl book and film, Amy Dunne is painted as being almost saintly. Then, in the second half, we realise she’s faked her own death and is determined to frame her husband Nick for her murder before brutally stabbing former beau Desi Collings. Yikes! Casting Pike against type was a masterstroke of director David Fincher.
Helena Bonham Carter, Harry Potter
Helena Bonham Carter made her name in the 1980s starring in a succession of English costume dramas where her cut-glass vowels (she’s super posh in real life, being descended from former Prime Minister Herbert Asquith) made her the quintessential English rose of the period. Then, in 2007, she made her Harry Potter debut as Bellatrix Lestrange, the silkily evil disciple of Lord Voldemort. Boo! Hiss!
Elizabeth Hurley, Bedazzled
Liz Hurley wasn’t known for any villainous roles before 2000, and then, suddenly, she was cast as the ultimate villain – Satan himself, in the remake of the Peter Cook-Dudley Moore satire Bedazzled. Admittedly, it’s not the kind of Devil we’re used to (she/it even rocks a bikini at one point because, well, it’s Liz Hurley), being more used to flirting outrageously with Brendan Fraser than dousing people in sulfur.
The Girl on the Train arrives at Cineworld on 5 October.
