Bullet Points: The 15 Most Badass Bald Guys

1. Codename 47

Yeah, I know – the movie sucked. Ignore the movie. Pretend it didn’t happen. The 47 of the original Hitman videogames was infinitely cooler, more disturbing, and much more interesting than Timothy Olyphant’s onscreen representation of him. We’re talking about a guy who spends the entirety of a game feeding and coddling his pet parakeet, only to snap the poor thing’s neck at the end when it starts chirping too loudly. Given the eastern European development team behind the game, it’s hard not to think of the skinheaded 47 as something of a neo-pseudo-Nazi – if that makes any sense.

2. Yul Brynner

Technically, this list is only supposed to include fictional characters, but screw it – Yul Brynner built his entire career off being bald and badass, so we’ll pay homage to all his roles. Whether he’s saving the innocent as a cowboy in The Magnificent Seven or ruthlessly murdering them as an android in Westworld, Yul Brynner made hairlessness pretty damned respectable. Heck, he was even badass in a musical, for Christ’s sake.

3. Kane

If you recognize this man, you are probably two things: firstly, a huge nerd, and secondly, an admirer of the character’s charisma in an otherwise cheesy-as-hell franchise. Kane, the antagonist of the Command and Conquer series, is basically like Stalin, Hitler, Cary Grant, and Daniel Day-Lewis from There Will Be Blood all rolled into one. He’s an evil, fascist dictator, but he’s kinda fun to spend time with. Also, the actor who plays him (Joe Kucan) never fucking ages.

4. Kingpin

The bad guy so big they couldn’t restrict him to one comic. The archenemy of both the Daredevil and the Punisher, Wilson Fisk not only rules New York with an iron (if meaty and fat-insulated) fist, but he can throw down with the best of them. According to his wikipedia page:

Contrary to all appearances, most of his body mass is actually muscle that has been built to extraordinary size, much like a sumo wrestler. The Kingpin is a master of many forms of armed and unarmed combat, particularly sumo, jujistu, and hapkido. His proficiency is such that he was able to hold his own in a battle with super-powered adversary Spider-Man early on in Spider-Man's career.

Sounds kind of like a dishonest excuse to me – “No, seriously, guys, it’s all muscle!” – but one has to respect a guy who can simultaneously kick Spider-Man’s ass and block out the sun with his corpulent mass.

5. Kojak

Perhaps the only bald hero on this list, Kojak is basically like Serpico – if Serpico was fictional, bald, and had a fetishistic desire for lollipops. Steadfastly moral unless he felt like Bending The Rules and Cutting Through The Red Tape in order to Catch A Scumbag, Kojak was a more or less thoughtful, family-friendly antithesis of the baldheaded cop type which would eventually appear with The Shield’s Vic Mackey.

6. Lex Luthor

The only man smart enough to almost kill Superman time after time, Lex Luthor can be a serious badass if written correctly. In Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing run, the villains and heroes of the DC Universe (including Batman!) repeatedly try and fail to kill the Swamp Thing – that is, until they hire Lex Luthor.

Within three panels of walking into the bad guys’ meeting room, Luthor figures out the Swamp Thing’s weakness, how to technologically exploit it, and what the bad guys need to do to make it work. In thirty seconds, Luthor accomplishes what no other DC character could have in the last ten or twelve issues; on his way out, Luthor tells the baddies where to send his check. Ignoring all of Gene Hackman’s over-the-top villainy in the Superman movie, Lex Luthor is actually one hardass motherfucker.

7. John McClane

In the first Die Hard, he had some hair. In the second, he had a little less. In the third, his hair seemed to be making a beeline for the back of his skull, and the fourth it was gone altogether. He is John McClane, and his head is far too badass to tolerate simple hair follicles.

8. Vic Mackey

Jack Bauer signed up for the LAPD, but not before shaving his head, eating eighty hamburgers, and getting really, really angry at everyone within a six-mile radius. An evil bastard with a heart of iron pyrite, Mackey seems to take way too much enjoyment out of killing, torturing, and stealing from drug dealers. Yeah, there’s some window dressing about how he’s trying to pay for his autistic son’s schooling or whatever, but who cares? Vic Mackey is a walking hunk of anger, meat, and no hair, constantly ready to headbutt crime at any given moment.

9. Pinhead

Despite only appearing in the first Hellraiser movie for about five minutes (and not even as an out-and-out villain), Pinhead has endured as one of the most visually arresting, characteristically disturbing personalities in horror cinema. Pinhead is endlessly interested in the human capacity for pain and pleasure – mostly pain – and yet, unlike so many other movie monsters, actually has some morals. He only kills people who summon him or force others to summon him, and the nails in his head seem to suggest he is being punished for something. That, or they just look really badass and they don’t mean anything.

10. Soda Popinski

I’m tempted to put his “real” name here and refer to him as Vodka Drunkinski, but the family-friendly censor of his name is far more hilarious than the original. Based on what Punch-Out teaches us, all Russians are three things:

-Bald

-Physically powerful

-Addicted to vodka soda pop

To be honest, I have yet to find a single shred of evidence to disprove any of these assertions.

11. Riddick

Hero? Villain? Based on the box office receipts for The Chronicles of Riddick, nobody really cares. Still, any list of badass bald men would be incomplete without mentioning the hilariously over-the-top, too-cool-for-school Riddick. Perhaps the only man in the history of cinema to kill someone with a teacup, Riddick represents everything silly, bombastic, and needlessly badass in modern action fare. Whether or not that appeals to you is, of course, a judgement call.

12. Dhalsim

YOGA FIRE

13. Tony Soprano

He gets killed at the end. One of the previous episodes is called “Member’s Only,” a character says that when you kill someone they never even know it happens, and the entire scene is basically framed like the Last Supper. He dies. He’s also badass, bald, and a scary son of a bitch given the right circumstances.

14. THX-1138

If Winston Smith had actually won over his dystopian society in 1984, he’d be THX-1138; bald, sex-deprived, and ultimately sick of the government’s shit, THX-1138 is assuredly one of the more interesting heroes in George Lucas’s film canon. Given THX-1138’s almost complete lack of dialogue and, at times, emotion, it’s almost impossible to believe that the mind who created him would one day go on to make all his characters scream their emotions at the top of their lungs.

15. Marsellus Wallace

He’s black, he’s bald, and he doesn’t look like a bitch. He also doesn’t like to be fucked by anybody except Mrs. Wallace. He also wants you to know that you ain’t got no problem. He’s on the motherfucker. Go back in there, chill them niggas out, and wait for the Wolf, who should be coming directly. He also wants you to know that the night of the fight, you may feel a slight…sting. That’s pride, fucking with you. Fuck pride.

He’s also going to get medieval on your ass.