10 Scene-Stealing Supporting Characters In Superhero Movies

10) Edna Mode – The Incredibles

How do superheroes always come up with such awesome costumes for themselves? That’s the question that’s given an answer in Disney/Pixar’s brilliant riff on superheroes, The Incredibles. It turns out they have a fashion designer who makes the threads for them. And that designer is the abrasive and diminutive Edna Mode.

Like many of the characters on this list, Edna only appears for a few brief scenes and really is little more than a plot device. Yet, she also nabs some of the movie’s most memorable lines (“No capes!”), something exacerbated by her weird shrill European voice.

Fun fact: Director Brad Bird never intended to provide the voice for Edna. He was actually coaching original choice Lily Tomlin on how he thought the character should sound when she advised him to play the role himself.

9) Nightcrawler – X2: X-Men United

Even thirteen years on and X2 stills sports the best opening of any X-Men movie to date, as Nightcrawler storms the White House and almost murders the President. It’s an awesome showcase of his ‘bamfing’ abilities (teleportation) and the reveal of his striking demonic appearance is well done.

Of course, this display of badassery isn’t the real Nightcrawler, who was under the thrall of General Stryker at the time, and in the rest of the movie we get to know the kind, religious mutant, in one of the best examples of the franchise’s core message of ‘don’t judge a book by its cover.’

It’s a great shame that Alan Cumming didn’t get to return to the role (the make-up process was too complicated to bring him back for X-Men: The Last Stand). However, at least we have Kodi Smit-McPhee playing a younger version Kurt Wagner from X-Men: Apocalypse onwards.