Ranked: Wes Anderson’s Most Memorable Characters

10. Kumar (Kumar Pallana in “Bottle Rocket”)
The terse and deadpan funny Kumar Pallana instantly made his mark in the Wes Anderson universe as Kumar in “Bottle Rocket,” a crackerjack thief and safecracking expert member of the Lawn Wrangler criminals. Unfortunately for him, he has a spell of dementia during their heist, loses his touch, and generally falls to pieces much to the dismay of crime organizer Dignan. But Kumar pretty much steals every scene he’s in — much like he continued to do in most Anderson movies ever since, often without uttering a word.

9. Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton in “Moonrise Kingdom”)
When a new member joins Anderson’s “rep company” of actors, it often seems to refresh the director, while usually showing another string to the actor’s bow too: that was certainly the case with Edward Norton’s genuinely surprising, completely charming turn in “Moonrise Kingdom.” Ludicrously outfitted in an adult-sized scout uniform, and negotiating scenes that involve trapdoors and treehouses and exclamations of “Jiminy Cricket! He flew the coop!” Norton displays a hitherto rarely mined comic ability. It’s his absolute command of Anderson’s ridiculous yet winsome tone that gives Scout Master Ward’s subplot (about earning the respect of dismissive peers) almost as much resonance as the lovers-on-the-run main story.

8. Dignan (Owen Wilson in “Bottle Rocket”)
The most conniving and shrewd of all the “Bottle Rocket” dreamers, the leader and organizer of the gentle losers and underachievers of Wes Anderson’s debut, Dignan, is still one the filmmaker’s best characters: incredibly ambitious, super naive to the point of delusion, and totally inept, which makes for an amusing and complex psychology of a daydreamer with so much hope, he lies in order to get everyone to the step often extended to self-deception as well (“They’ll never catch me… because I’m fucking innocent” goes the classic line). But it’s ultimately that beguiling, mischievous, and fox-like glint in Dignan’s eye that captures the soul of “Bottle Rocket.”

7. Steve Zissou (Bill Murray in “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou”)
Bill Murray has appeared (or lent his voice) to every one of Anderson’s films since 1998. He might have given a better performance (arguable, but see below…), but no Anderson film rests as heavily on the actor’s shoulders as “The Life Aquatic.” His Cousteau-aping biologist, forever clad in his iconic blue shirt and red bobble hat, is a selfish, egotistical shit even by the standards of Anderson’s characters, but the charisma, faint desperation, and, ultimately, heart that Murray brings somehow makes Zissou palatable. He might have little idea of the consequences of his actions, but he does spend the movie tracking down the shark that killed his partner, and learns enough (through finding a surrogate son in Owen Wilson’s Ned) that he lets the creature go, resulting in one of the director’s most moving climaxes.

6. Eli Cash (Owen Wilson in “The Royal Tenenbaums”)
If there is a core trinity of W.A. actors, it must be Schwartzman, Murray, and Owen Wilson. And of all the roles that Wilson has taken for the director, Eli Cash, the ‘Tenenbaum wannabe’ and genre Western fiction writer supposedly modeled on Cormac McCarthy and Jay McInerney, is our pick of the crop. Because despite the ten-gallon hat and being “very much so” on mescaline a lot of the time, Eli is one of the subtler characters in Anderson’s repertoire, a drolly comic take on an almost Ripley-like personality, whose dazzled envy leads him to drug abuse and clumsy attempts at manipulation, yet there’s always something pitiable and relatable in his interloper status.

5. Margot Tenenbaum (Gwyneth Paltrow in “The Royal Tenenbaums”)
Anderson might not really be known for his women, but he does create some memorably secretive and alluring feminine foils. And the ur-Anderson female in this regard is Paltrow’s Margot, married to Raleigh (Bill Murray), lusted after by Eli (Owen Wilson), incestuously desired by Ritchie (Luke Wilson), and understood by no one. Covetably dressed, fetishizably made up, with a buried wit that’s drier than the Atacama desert, Margot is really the only Anderson woman that we could conceivably see as a lead in her own right, and more than any other character apart from Royal, it’s Margot who fuels and embodies the Tenebaums’ various neuroses.

4. Herman Blume (Bill Murray in “Rushmore”)
We’ll always love Bill Murray whatever happens — “Ghostbusters” and “Groundhog Day” alone assured that. But the 1990s were not a great time for the star, with movies like “Larger Than Life,” “Space Jam,” and “The Man Who Knew Too Little” stinking up his CV. Fortunately, along came Wes Anderson and “Rushmore,” irrevocably changing his career, and making him not just a comedy legend, but also an indie icon. There’s a throughline to Herman Blume from Murray’s great anti-authoritarian characters of the 1980s, as if Peter Venkman had sold out to the man, but Anderson brought out something new, playing up the deep sadness and disappointment at the universe that had always been there, and pushing him into the mid-life crisis phase of his career, as a man who finds a new lease of life, not always constructively, in his frenemy-ship with an ambitious teenage boy.

3. M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes in “The Grand Budapest Hotel”)
We do need to stop being surprised when Ralph Fiennes, a.k.a. Great Shakespearean, a.k.a. Voldemort, a.k.a. Amon Goeth, does something lighthearted, but it is still a pleasant discovery when he’s so damn good at it. His M. Gustave is a wonderful creation, zany when he needs to be, arch and almost effete at times. Though also a womanizer and a cad, he’s shot through with the same sad nostalgia for disappearing times that gives ‘Grand Budapest’ its lovely melancholia amid all the Lubitschy hi-jinks. Like all our top picks, Gustave has depth beyond Anderson’s obvious surface pleasures.

2. Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman in “Rushmore”)
While any of our top five picks could have challenged for the number on spot, and might win on another day, the one we’re genuinely gutted at having to move aside is Max Fischer. This character, more than any other, defined Anderson’s approach early on (stories of misfit, oddly sincere, completely anachronistic outsiders) and gave Jason Schwartzman his entire career (it was his very first role). Max’s wild pretension and overweening precociousness make him difficult to root for, yet Anderson and Schwartzman both undercut the character’s self-importance with just enough skewering humor that it’s impossible not to love the delusional, romantic fool.

1. Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman in “The Royal Tenenbaums”)
Perhaps it’s inevitable that, with so many of Anderson’s regular troupe (much though we love them) feeling like known quantities, our number one slot would go to an actor who only appeared once for him. Then again, when that actor is Gene Hackman, making one of his increasingly rare late-career appearance (he’s only done 3 films since) in a role specifically written for him, who can argue? As terrific as much of ‘Tenenbaums’ is, it’s Hackman who is its heart, and where the other heavily aestheticized characters can seem a little like (delightfully) shorthanded versions of the roles as written in what is probably Anderson’s best-ever script, Hackman’s innate talents make him arguably the best example of transcending Anderson’s potentially smothering style. We get the paradox: in this list of Wes Anderson’s greatest characters, we’ve chosen the performer who most breaks out of Anderson’s silo as our favorite, but maybe here, of all places, such droll contradictions are the order of the day.

Who else? This list may be 70 characters strong, but we just know some of you are sputtering with rage at someone we’ve overlooked (indeed A Certain Someone behind the scenes here may never fully forgive us for not including “Bottle Rocket”‘s Applejack, while some of us are miffed at the exclusion of Bob Balaban‘s narrator character from ‘Moonrise’). Shout out your neglected favorites, or put up your dukes about the ranking in the comments below — just do keep in mind that there are probably as many different versions of this list as there are readers, and, as the unfailingly polite Wes Anderson always does, keep it civil, eh?

— with Rodrigo “What This List Needs Is More ‘Bottle Rocket'” Perez