He even has the Stalin stache.
Alex Rider despite being a relatively new franchise has managed to produce quite a few vile villains.
Literature[]
- Stormbreaker: Herod Sayle is a multimillionaire who holds a petty grudge against England and the Prime Minister. After being bullied incessantly as a child and teenager by English schoolchildren, Sayle planned to strike back by creating a smallpox outbreak that would kill hundreds of thousands of children. Using his new Stormbreaker computers, Sayle hid small vials of smallpox into the devices so that they would be released once children turned on the computers. When Alex Rider's uncle, Ian, found out about this, Sayle had him murdered. Later on, after Sayle discovers Alex was working undercover for MI6, Sayle instructed one of his lackeys to torture Alex to death with knives. Once Sayle's plans are foiled by Alex, Sayle kidnaps Alex and almost shoots him to death, all while promising that he'll resurface in the future to strike back at England again.
- Skeleton Key: Conrad and his boss are trying to nuke the area and kill everyone while Aaron is Well-Intentioned Extremist Conrad on the other hand doesn't really share these beliefs and is just working with him for the money he has been paid and the opportunity to kill people. He's also established as a psychopath who blew up his school as a child with a bomb, he made in science class as revenge for being given a detention for being late. He carries out Sarov's orders with sadism, and when Sarov leaves Alex to die in the blast, Conrad secretly stays behind to kill him violently with his own hands.
- Snakehead: Major Winston Yu is another board member, as well as the leader of a ruthless Snakehead gang. He takes part in Scorpia's plans to kill the members of a conference against poverty. His plan involves causing a tsunami and kill millions of people to make the deaths look like an accident, overshadow the deaths of the conference members with the deaths of millions, and to drum up sales for his Snakehead gang. When Yu captures Alex, he decides to have him slowly killed on a hospital bed as he removes his organs one by one; one organ a day until all that is left of him is a husk. This seems to be his preferred method of execution, since he has people killed in the same hospital, in the same way on a regular basis. Yu is so bad that his henchmen commit suicide before he can punish them for failure.
- Scorpia: Julia Rothman is an executive board member of Scorpia, who plans to make outrageous demands to Britain that will never be met, kill every schoolchild in London when they are not met, and make the same demand to America with the same consequence knowing that they will meet them, and ultimately cause a war to erupt between the two countries. To demonstrate the weapon and show that she is not bluffing; she kills a completely separate group of high school football players without giving them a chance to be saved. She also manipulates Alex into joining Scorpia by getting him to think his father worked for them and was killed by MI6 when it was the other way around. Rothman is also an awful boss who will frequently murder her own men for failure and kills a colleague via venomous scorpions when he objects to her plan. When confronted by Alex, Rothman shrugs off the thousands of deaths that will occur, all for the sake of money.
- Scorpia Rising: Abdul-Aziz Al-Rahim, better known as just Razim, is another agent of Scorpia, and is affiliated with them purely to slake his sadistic curiosities. A cold, unfeeling sociopath since his history of violence in his youth, Razim sold out his own parents and sister to Saddam Hussein before joining Scorpia. Come his involvement in Operation Horseman, Razim plans to blackmail Britain into handing over the Elgin Marbles, or else defame the country by revealing the contents of the Horseman file, ultimately to assassinate the Prime Minister of England and throw the country into a war. Fascinated by pain, Razim routinely tortures countless innocents to death in perverse "experiments", in an attempt to create a measurement for pain, initially claiming it for the sake of science but likely simply to amuse himself more than anything. When Razim captures Alex, Razim forces him to watch his mentor and guardian Jack Starbright blown up—in truth handing her off to the Grimaldi twins but keeping the emotional stab to Alex all the same, while casually adding the boy's emotional pain was so great, he may have to create a second measurement. From there on, Razim tries to have the US Secretary of State assassinated, framing Alex so that he'll be shot dead. Lacking the scale of previous antagonists but trumping all of them in sheer, frightening sadism, Razim makes his mark even in the dark world of Alex Rider as Alex's most personal foe.
Stormbreaker Film[]
- Darius Sayle plots to use his Stormbreaker computers to release a deadly virus to kill millions of schoolchildren all over Britain, in retaliation for being bullied at school as a child for being a foreigner. When he discovers that security guard Ian Rider is actually a spy sent to find out about his plan, he has him killed by Yassen Gregorovich, and when Ian's nephew Alex is caught as well, Darius has him thrown into his aquarium tank to be killed by his pet man o' war. When the control to activate the Stormbreakers at the launch party is destroyed, he tries to activate them himself with an override, and tries to kill Alex and his school crush Sabina Pleasure when they try to stop him.
2020 Series[]
- Dr. Hugo Greif somehow manages to be even worse than his novel counterpart. In the past a research scientist in the field of cloning, before vanishing and showing up many years later. Greif admired several dictators, especially Adolf Hitler, and would found the Point Blanc academy with the intention of taking over the entire world. To do so, Greif would market his academy as a place for troubled teens, only grabbing the children of rich influential industrialists and replacing them with clones of himself surgically altered to look like the teens, killing the parents so they could never discover the swap. Greif locked the teens inside a basement in the academy and had them tortured for information that the clones could use, with many of them going insane as a result, with Greif planning to kill all of the teens once they were no longer useful to him. Greif's final plan was to wipe out 99% of the entire human population so only the strong could survive to curb overpopulation and create a better world for him to rule over.
- Julia Rothman presents herself as a polite, wealthy art patron, when in truth she's the effective leader of Scorpia. After having Scorpia back the dangerous plots of Dr. Greif and Damian Cray, Julia decides that Scorpia should carry out its own plan to assert their dominance. To this end, Julia devises Operation Invisible Sword, a way of covertly killing anyone in the world they desire. She then gives the UK deliberately unreasonable demands while threatening to kill hundreds of thousands of people if they aren't met, killing a football team as a demonstration. After this, Julia tries to kill everyone in the city of Bath to plunge Britain into chaos as an example to the world so she can threaten other countries with the same fate. Julia also takes an interest in Alex Rider, convincing him to join Scorpia like his father and that the Department had murdered him, when in truth Julia had him killed herself for being a mole from the Department, and she only wants to bring Alex in as revenge against his father and see the look on his face when she kills him.