James Franco in Spider-Man 3.
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Or maybe Spider-Man 3 has a quadruple-gänger. Peter also must confront his photographer rival Eddie Brock (a.k.a. Venom), played by Topher Grace. "He gets very similar powers to Spider-Man; they work in the same place, they're after the same girls," he says. The difference: Grace can be extreme without worrying about breaking character. "When you play a protagonist, a bell goes off every time you do something outside the range of normal behavior," Grace says. "But when you're a psycho from outer space, there's something very freeing. With great powers comes great fun."
6. GET USED TO FEELING TRAPPED
IN A FANTASY FILM, THE VILLAIN OFTEN NEEDS TO look very ugly or old or outré. That depends on the skill of the makeup-effects artist--and the patience of the actor. "Putting on the makeup and the fangs took four hours," says Grace about his Spider-Man 3 rig. "Then another 45 minutes to put on the suit--and you can't go the bathroom in it, which is a problem they still haven't solved after three of these films."
In Stardust, Pfeiffer plays a witch who sometimes looks 20 (at 49 the actress seems to have been instantly time-warped to her Scarface youth) and sometimes 200, with frown lines and liver spots popping up in seconds. "What I didn't anticipate was the horror of wearing all those prosthetics," she says. "The hardest thing is sitting in that chair five hours while they're applied, and knowing you have another 12 hours keeping them on." Wearing all that wrinkly glop on your face is hard enough--but how do you act through it? "There's a certain lack of facial expression," says Pfeiffer, "so you have to go bigger and broader. Forget about subtlety!"
Not that she's complaining. "Your big responsibility is that they hate you. As long as you're hateful, you've done your job."
7. RELISH THE FANTASY
THEY MAY MAKE THE WRONG KINDS OF headlines now and again, but actors are mostly like the rest of ordinary us--except that they can pretend to be extraordinary, in ways nice or naughty. "Movies are the only chance you get to be a villain," Dinklage says. "You don't want to walk down the street and be a villain. But on film you can get away with it."
You can even get away with playing to ignorant assumptions--if you're Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat. Chow signed on to Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End to impersonate what he describes as "the Western audience's stereotype of the Chinese bad guy from the 17th century: long beard, long fingernails." But he didn't fret over the racial cartoonery. "I just let it flow. I'm a good boy."
And for one good baddie on Pirates, the rewards are great. Geoffrey Rush is back as Captain Barbossa, the ghostly seaman "so wicked that Hell spat him back out," Rush says. This time he has a central role, but that's not the only perk. His character is an action figure and has been added to the Disney parks' Pirates ride. "For every actor, no matter what territory you work in, it's a very important moment in your life when you see yourself in a little cellophane box, and then know that that figure will be 10 ft. tall in the Disney ride."
Playing a misfit pianist in Shine may have won him an Oscar, but look at the prize Rush won for playing a villain.