The Most Iconic 80s Movie Characters
Some movie characters stay inside their movies. A few climb out and take up residence in the culture, and once they do, they never really leave. The 80s produced more of those than any decade before or since.
This is the straight version of the list. If you came for the quotable ones, the guys who made you laugh until you couldn’t breathe, we already did that: our funniest 80s movie characters rundown covers Spicoli, Ferris, Axel and the rest, and nobody from that page repeats here. These fifteen are the ones who defined the decade in a different way, and every one of them earned the spot.
1. Indiana Jones (Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981)
Steven Spielberg directing a Lawrence Kasdan script from a George Lucas story, all of it built to resurrect the movie serials Lucas grew up on, and Harrison Ford turning what could have been a cardboard adventurer into a man who is visibly exhausted and improvising the entire time. That is the whole trick of Indiana Jones: he gets hurt, he gets scared, he makes it up as he goes. Here is the part people forget. Tom Selleck was cast first. He had the part and had to give it back, because his contract on Magnum, P.I. would not release him. Bill Murray, Nick Nolte and Steve Martin were all in the conversation too. The decade’s defining adventurer came down to a television scheduling conflict. The full Indiana Jones story is worth your time.
2. E.T. (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, 1982)
A rubber alien with a glowing finger should not be able to gut a grown adult, and yet. Spielberg built the character out of something genuinely private: an imaginary friend he invented as a kid after his parents divorced. Melissa Mathison wrote it, Columbia passed on it because they doubted anyone would pay to see it, and Universal bought the script for a million dollars. Spielberg shot the film in rough chronological order, unusual and expensive, so his young cast would live the story in sequence and the goodbye would land. It cost $10.5 million. It is still the reason a generation cannot look at a bicycle silhouetted against the moon without getting something in their eye. More on E.T. here.
3. Marty McFly (Back to the Future, 1985)
The perfect 80s protagonist: a skateboarding kid in a puffy vest who wants to be a rock star and accidentally has to supervise his own parents’ courtship. Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale had been kicking the idea around since 1980, and what makes Marty work is that Michael J. Fox plays him as fundamentally decent and constantly one second from disaster. Pair him with Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Brown and you get one of the great odd-couple friendships in American film, an old man and a teenager who treat each other as equals. We gave Marty his own page, because he earned it.
4. The Terminator (The Terminator, 1984)
James Cameron got the premise from a fever dream during the release of his first movie, and turned it into the most implacable villain of the decade: a machine with a human face that does not negotiate, tire, or stop. The casting is the great what-if of 80s cinema. Orion sent Arnold Schwarzenegger the script for Kyle Reese, the hero. Stallone and Mel Gibson both turned down the Terminator. Cameron went into his meeting with Schwarzenegger intending to pick a fight so he could walk away, spent the lunch sketching the man’s face on a notepad instead, and came back saying he would make a hell of a Terminator. Schwarzenegger himself did not see it coming. Asked on the set of Conan the Destroyer about the wardrobe shoes he was carrying, he said: “Oh, some shit movie I’m doing, take a couple weeks.”
5. Ellen Ripley (Aliens, 1986)
Ripley existed before the 80s, but Aliens is where she became an icon, because Cameron did something almost nobody was doing: he wrote an action lead who is competent, terrified, and a woman, and he did not soften a single edge of it. Sigourney Weaver was nominated for Best Actress for a movie with a powerloader fight in it. She lost to Marlee Matlin, but the nomination itself was the milestone: it was the first Best Actress nomination ever given for a science fiction film, at a time when the Academy treated the genre as furniture. Aliens took home Sound Effects Editing and Visual Effects at the same ceremony.
6. Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984)
Wes Craven built the one monster you cannot outrun by putting him where you have to go every night. Robert Englund gave Freddy something no slasher had: a personality, a sense of humor, a horrible delight in the work. The film cost about $1.1 million, featured Johnny Depp in his first movie role, and did so much for its young distributor that New Line Cinema has been called the House that Freddy Built ever since. Craven took the seed of it from real news stories about refugees who died in the middle of nightmares. Our Freddy Krueger breakdown goes deeper.
7. Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13th Part III, 1982)
Freddy talked. Jason never had to. He is the other pole of 80s horror: silence, size, and total inevitability, and he became a permanent piece of American iconography in 1982 when Part III put the hockey mask on him for the first time. Before that he was a guy in a sack. After it, he was a silhouette you could draw from memory in three strokes, which is the highest bar a horror design can clear. See the rest of his run in our Jason Voorhees in the 80s piece, and the full accident-on-set story in why Jason wears a hockey mask.
8. John McClane (Die Hard, 1988)
McClane rewrote the job description for action heroes. He is not a commando, he is a tired New York cop in another man’s building with no shoes, and he spends the movie bleeding, swearing and improvising against Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber, still the standard every movie villain gets measured against. Nearly every big name of the decade turned the part down, Schwarzenegger and Stallone included, which is how it landed with Bruce Willis, known then mostly for television and paid $5 million to find out he was a movie star. Ordinary guy, extraordinary night. Everything since has copied it. More on John McClane here.
9. Tony Montana (Scarface, 1983)
Brian De Palma directing an Oliver Stone script with Al Pacino at maximum voltage, telling the story of a Cuban refugee who arrives in Miami during the Mariel boatlift and claws his way to the top of the cocaine trade. Sidney Lumet developed it and walked away because he found it too violent, which tells you where the finished film landed. Stone wrote it in Paris while fighting his own cocaine problem, and it shows in the best way: the movie has no illusions about what it is watching. It runs 170 minutes, took a beating from critics on release for its violence, got reappraised for years afterward, and is now so deep in the culture that people quote a man they would never want to meet.
10. John Rambo (First Blood, 1982)
Worth remembering what this character actually was before the sequels turned him into a one-man army. In First Blood, Rambo is a homeless Vietnam veteran walking through a small town who gets pushed by a sheriff for no reason other than how he looks, and everything that follows is the war coming home. Stallone co-wrote it and plays him with barely any dialogue until the ending. Richard Crenna’s Colonel Trautman and Brian Dennehy’s Sheriff Teasle give him two poles to break against. It made $125.2 million and left a character whose name became shorthand for the opposite of the sad, cornered man in the original film. Read our John Rambo profile.
11. RoboCop (RoboCop, 1987)
Paul Verhoeven made the most violent satire of the decade and everybody was having too much fun to notice it was satire. Alex Murphy is a Detroit cop murdered on duty and rebuilt by a corporation into a product with a badge, and Peter Weller plays the tragedy under all that steel: a machine slowly recovering the memory of having been a man. Edward Neumeier came up with the idea while working on the set of Blade Runner, which is a fittingly bleak origin. The commercials between the action scenes are still funnier and meaner than most comedies. Meet RoboCop here.
12. Beetlejuice (Beetlejuice, 1988)
Michael Keaton, filthy, striped and completely unhinged, in a Tim Burton film about a nice dead couple who cannot get rid of the living. The performance is a small miracle of restraint in reverse: Keaton is barely in the movie compared to how much you remember him being in it. It made $84 million against a $15 million budget, won the Academy Award for Best Makeup, and it runs on Harry Belafonte calypso records, which nobody could have predicted and everybody now considers inevitable. Say the name three times on our Beetlejuice page.
13. Gizmo (Gremlins, 1984)
Three rules, and a creature designed so well that a generation begged their parents for one. Joe Dante directed, a young Chris Columbus wrote it, and Howie Mandel supplied the voice. Gizmo belongs on this list for a reason beyond cuteness: Gremlins was violent enough that, combined with the complaints about Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Spielberg pushed the MPAA to fix its ratings system, and the PG-13 rating was created within two months of the movie’s release. A cute little Mogwai changed how every film in America has been rated ever since. More on Gizmo here.
14. Inigo Montoya (The Princess Bride, 1987)
The most beloved revenge in movie history, and one of the few characters on this list whose most famous line is the entire character: a Spanish swordsman who has spent his life training to find the six-fingered man who killed his father. Rob Reiner directed William Goldman’s adaptation of his own novel, and Mandy Patinkin does something rare, playing a man defined by grief without ever letting it curdle. The duel is real work, too. Patinkin and Cary Elwes trained about three weeks with Bob Anderson and Peter Diamond, both of whom had taught the original Star Wars cast, learned to fence left- and right-handed, and performed the fight themselves apart from two somersaults.
15. Conan (Conan the Barbarian, 1982)
The movie that proved Arnold Schwarzenegger could carry a film, two years before The Terminator made it official. John Milius co-wrote it with Oliver Stone, drew on Robert E. Howard’s pulp original, and shot it like a myth rather than an adventure: long, brutal, oddly solemn. James Earl Jones plays Thulsa Doom, the snake-cult leader, and gives the film a villain with a voice that could level a building. Conan barely speaks, which was the correct instinct on every level. Take the whole ride in our Conan the Barbarian rundown.
The through-line: almost none of these were sure things. The lead was miscast, the studio passed, the budget was small, the star was a television actor, or the director was making something the money people did not understand. The decade’s most permanent characters were mostly accidents that went right.
The honest bottom line
What separates a great character from an iconic one is whether he outlives the film. Every name on this list passes that test: you can describe Indy in one sentence, draw Jason’s mask from memory, quote McClane without having seen Die Hard in twenty years. That is not nostalgia doing the work, it is craft. The 80s had a run of filmmakers who understood that an audience will forgive almost any plot if it loves the person walking through it, and we have been living off that run ever since.
FAQ
Who is the most iconic 80s movie character?
Indiana Jones has the strongest claim: Raiders of the Lost Ark opened the decade in 1981 and set the template for adventure movies that filmmakers still follow. Marty McFly, Ellen Ripley, the Terminator and John McClane are all in the same conversation.
Was Harrison Ford the first choice for Indiana Jones?
No. Tom Selleck was cast in the role and had to withdraw because of his contract on Magnum, P.I.
Which 80s movie character led to the PG-13 rating?
Gremlins, along with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, prompted Spielberg to push the MPAA to revise its ratings. PG-13 was created within two months of the release of Gremlins in 1984.
When did Jason Voorhees first wear the hockey mask?
In Friday the 13th Part III, released in 1982. He had worn a sack over his head in the previous film.
Who turned down the role of John McClane in Die Hard?
Several of the era’s biggest stars passed on it, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. Bruce Willis took the part for $5 million.
Lists like this get argued at our place the way they got argued in the video store lines we grew up in. Want the funny half of the decade instead? Go to our funniest 80s movie characters list, meet the crew that started the treasure hunt in The Goonies characters, take the strangest detour of them all with Pee-wee Herman, and then see the full countdown in our 80s pop culture icons guide.