Assassins and contract killers who also have day jobs

Bill Hader’s pitch-dark comedy begins with Barry, a contract killer, stumbling into an acting class and immediately having a passion for it. Eventually, Barry does start to get acting work. Of course, he also continues killing people for money. Hader, and also Henry Winkler, both won Emmys for “Barry.”

If you are going to be part of a nascent rebellion against an authoritarian regime, it helps to have a job to serve as a cover. That goes double when we’re talking about the Empire from “Star Wars.” Those guys have access to the Force and stuff! On “Andor,” by day Luthen Rael is a gregarious, perhaps even scatterbrained antiques dealer. It is fully a façade, though. In reality, Luthen is one of the most-cutthroat members of the resistance, including committing assassinations and acts of terrorism himself.

Joe Turner, Robert Redford’s character in “Three Days of the Condor,” has a cover for being a CIA agent. However, he’s not an assassin. He’s a Jack Ryan-style analyst who stumbles upon a secret that a rogue contingency within the CIA is willing to kill to keep under wraps. One character in the film is simply known as The Mailman. Let’s just say that he’s not involved in the action because he really wants Joe Turner to get his mail.

Christoph Waltz won his second Oscar for “Django Unchained.” He plays Dr. King Schultz, a dentist (no longer practicing, it would seem) who now works as a bounty hunter. Schultz is also not afraid to do some killing along the way. He’s kind of like a fictionalized Doc Holliday in that sense. If this one feels a little on the fence, we’ll throw in the “Kill Bill” movies and consider it all of a piece.

This is another political thriller, and to be fair, Raymond Shaw isn’t intentionally moonlighting as an assassin. Using 1960s movie logic, Shaw is a former soldier who during the Korean War was brainwashed by Chinese communists into being an assassin. As such, when his brainwashing is triggered, Shaw goes into action. “The Manchurian Candidate” is actually one of the best political thrillers of the era, as it’s quite stylized and a little trippy.

Sure, it’s the movie that started the Brad Pitt and Angelina romance/Brangelina media craze. It’s also a movie about two assassins who have other jobs they use as covers. That’s not the hook of the story. The hook of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” is that these two married people don’t know the other is an assassin. They do have jobs, though. Construction and tech support, specifically.

We know the MCU exists under its own logic, but “Captain America: Brave New World” introduced a truly out-there notion. Bucky Barnes as a politician. That would be the same Bucky Barnes also known as the Winter Soldier, an assassin that, if we recall correctly, played a role in the JFK assassination in the world of Marvel movies? Sure enough, in “Thunderbolts*,” Bucky is a member of Congress, but he also gets back to what he does best, which is as a living weapon. Also, Red Guardian is also driving a limo, but he’s just trying to make ends meet.

“The Quick and the Dead” is a gimmick-heavy Western movie from Sam Raimi. An Old West town is holding a dueling competition, and naturally everybody has to have some kind of hook. There is our lead, Sharon Stone’s “The Lady,” and a pre-superstardom Leonardo DiCaprio as “The Kid.” Then, there’s Cort. Played by an also pre-superstardom Russell Crowe, Cort is a former gunfighter turned preacher who, upon coercion, picks up guns with ill intent once again.

Living a double life is front-and-center to “Breaking Bad.” Both Walter White and Gus Fring are ruthless criminals, killers at times, who present themselves to the world in a different way. Gus is the proprietor of a successful fast food chain, after all. Mike Ehrmantraut, though, is the one who most-often serves as a trigger man, professionally speaking. While the duality of Mike is that he is a loving grandfather in addition to being a proficient hitman, he is also a former cop turned private investigator. Also, on “Better Call Saul,” he works as a security guard for a bit.

Bond villains pretty much also have a henchman, or a henchwoman, occasionally even multiple. Somebody like, say, Jaws or Xenia, basically just hench, and basically just kill. Auric Goldfinger presents himself as a businessman, though. Thus, he has a “manservant” in Oddjob. Oddjob may caddy on the golf course, but he will also kill Goldfinger’s enemies with his razor-brimmed hat.

Robert Rodriguez made his name, to a degree, with 1993’s ultra-low-budget “El Mariachi.” That movie got him attention, which gave him a bigger budget (a whole $7 million!) to make the sequel. Antonio Banderas stepped into the lead role for “Desperado,” which also featured a pre-fame Salma Hayek. Manito, aka El Mariachi is, well, a guitarist. He’s also as likely to have a guitar case filled with guns than an actual guitar.

“Road to Perdition” is the rare movie where Tom Hanks plays a bad guy. He’s the anti-hero of the film, but Hanks’ role is that of an enforcer for the Irish mob. Hanks’ Michael Sullivan isn’t the one with the other gig, though. Jude Law plays a menacing killer for hire who is also a photographer.

Technically, Christian Wolff, the main character in “The Accountant,” is a criminal accountant, not a hitman. At least, that’s his role at first. There’s a reason why the poster for “The Accountant” features Ben Affleck holding a massive gun, though. The sequel poster has Affleck and Jon Bernthal, as Christian’s brother, holding guns on the poster. Wolff may be an accountant, but he’s doing plenty of other criminal activity.

“The Old Man” is about, well, old men who find their past actions in the CIA coming back to haunt them. Jeff Bridges stars as…we’ll call him Dan Chase, but he’s a former CIA operative with a lot of aliases. He had, and has, multiple other gigs that serve and served to cover his history of violence. Unfortunately, the second season of the show was overly optimistic about its future, so “The Old Man” was canceled on a cliffhanger.

It’s a tale as old as time. Male models, by dint of being stupid and used to taking direction, have been brainwashed into being assassins for years. Sure, the occasional hand model avoids that fate, but in “Zoolander,” basically every major assassination has been pulled off by a male model. Will Derek Zoolander end up killing the Malaysian prime minister? Or can he be stopped before it’s too late?

In the lore-heavy, stylized world of “John Wick,” a ballerina turned assassin is far from unexpected. The third film in the series briefly featured a ballerina being trained in the art of contract killing. When the time came for a spinoff movie, they opted to go with the ballerina. They recast the role by bringing in Ana de Armas. Then, when people seemed disinterested in “Ballerina,” they basically just made it a John Wick movie.