Patrick Stewart is an actor who has been perfecting his craft for decades. Some of his best-known roles place him in a more heroic role like Professor X in the X-Men film franchise. However, he has also played a more wise and noble leader as Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. That being said, he still has a wide range of skills when it comes to acting in different genres that never gets to shine often. One terrifying example is how he portrays Darcy, the main antagonist in 2015's Green Room.
Green Room follows an up-and-coming punk band on tour. When they can't find any good gigs, they are recommended to play at an isolated compound in the Oregon forests. But they aren't told that the compound is actually a club for Neo-Nazis. Before they leave, one of the bandmates, Pat (Anton Yelchin), gets their friend's phone and accidentally witnesses a murder. From that point on, it's a fight for survival as they try to outsmart their captors in a situation where the odds aren't in their favor.
Stewart's character, Darcy, doesn't appear until the situation begins to go south. However, when he does arrive on the scene, it's clear that many of the men in his group are ruled by the fear and respect Darcy evokes. The moment he understands the situation, Darcy begins to organize the right men for the job and gets the real people responsible for the murder out of the way. To keep up appearances, they call the cops and have two of their own stab themselves to make it seem like they were the reason the police were called instead of the murder. What's scary about Stewart's acting in the scene is how little he cares about watching his own men stab each other for him.
After getting rid of the police, Darcy attempts to negotiate and get the gun away from his captors. However, the moment they feel safe to do so, a group of high-ranking Neo-Nazis, known as red laces, ambushes Pat and nearly cuts his hand off. The show of force shows that while he's calm and collected, Darcy holds a violent streak focused on deliberate psychological attacks where violence is all a part of the act.
As Green Room nears its end, Pat and his friends put up more of a fight than Darcy expected, but he still relies on his strategies to see his plan through to the end. The objective is to kill all witnesses of the murder and make it look like enough of an accident that he and his men won't be implicated. But even though his command and willingness to maim and murder are terrifying, it's nothing compared to the realization that Darcy has likely done this before.
From the moment he appears to his final stand against the survivors, Darcy seems more inconvenienced and annoyed than concerned over the situation. He treats the survivors like pests that must be eliminated without hesitation. It makes audiences ponder how many times this character has had to kill to maintain his ideals and club and at what point he stopped feeling anything about it. Nevertheless, audiences have seen Stewart act with a sense of justice or simply joke around in American Dad! However, Green Room is a true testament to the actor's range and how scary he can truly be.
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