Save the Cat

The killers we like

I started to write this post long before the world heard of Luigi Mangione, the (alleged) murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. I’ll get to him later.

This post was instead promoted by a television show I just finished watching called The Day of the Jackal. Loosely based on the novel of the same name, it is about an assassin, played by Eddie Redmayne, and the British intelligence officer, played by Lashana Lynch, who is trying to track him down. 

It’s a good show—suspenseful, engaging, and well-acted. But it’s Redmayne who makes it work. His Jackal isn’t just determined, smart, and extremely good at what he does; he’s also likable. He’s a good guy. You don’t want him to get captured or killed. You want him to make it home safe to his wife and son. You like him.

What makes this interesting is that he’s not one of these assassins who only kills bad guys. In the course of his missions, he murders perfectly decent people who have the bad luck to get in his way.

The Jackal is just the latest of a series of likable killers. (See this article, Hitmen with a Heart, for a partial list.) There is Dexter, played by Michael C. Hall, who is a serial killer who kills other serial killers—but also murders the occasional innocent colleague who discovers his secret.

Other killers, either active or retired, are John Wick, played by Keanu Reeves in the John Wick series; Martin Blank, played by John Cusack in Grosse Point Blank; Sam Young, played by Ben Whishaw in Black Doves; and Barry Berkman, played by Bill Hader, in Barry. Loveable hitmen all.

Not all fictional bad guys are likable. We might be fascinated by Tony Soprano, Walter White, Hannibal Lecter, Anton Chigurh, and—to name a different sort of bad guy—Humbert Humbert from Lolita. Maybe we even root for them. But we don’t like them, not in the sense we like The Jackal.

This is not a post about killers, real or fictional. It’s a post about what makes people likable, one that starts with the interesting fact that murdering innocent people doesn’t seem to get in the way.

---

All of these likable killers are very good-looking men.

There are fewer female killers, but they are similarly easy on the eyes. Consider Villanelle in Killing Eve, Natasha Romanoff in the Avenger films, or Nikita in the various versions of La Femme Nikita—or just about any of the hot female assassins listed here.

Good looks make people more likable. We tend to think that they are more intelligent, kinder, and more honest than the rest of us. This is what psychologists call “the halo effect”: being high on one trait, like attractiveness, spills over to our judgments of other traits, like being smart—for a review of the research, see here.

This explains part of the appeal of real-world killers like (allegedly) Luigi Mangione. Yes, much of people's warmth towards him stems from frustration with the American healthcare system. But if he looked like the Unabomber, nobody would be swooning over him.

---

Looks do help. Still, there are good-looking killers that we don’t like at all, like this handsome devil.

Good looks aren’t enough to get us to like Ted Bundy.

So what is it? What’s the secret sauce that makes some people—even some killers—likable?

---