Characters / MCU: Kevin Thompson

Main Character Index > Villainous Individuals and Organizations > Other Supervillains > Emil Blonsky | Ultron | Darren Cross | Helmut Zemo | Erik Stevens | Mysterio | Kevin Thompson | Agatha Harkness

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Kevin Thompson / Kilgrave

"I'm a man of my word… if I feel like it."

Species: Enhanced human

Citizenship: British

Portrayed By: David Tennant, James Freedson-Jackson (young)

Voiced By: Cristián Lizama and Rodrigo Saavedra (young) (Latin-America Chilean dub), Hélio Ribeiro (Brazilian Portuguese dub), Yasuyuki Kase (Japanese dub)

Appearances: Jessica Jones

"Jessica, I'm the only one who matches you. We're inevitable."

A menacing, shadowy figure from Jessica Jones's past who's responsible for her current state. He's a sociopath with the power to control the actions of others, but not the thoughts, which he uses to obtain money, food, shelter, pleasure and even get his victims to commit violence against others and even themselves.

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#-G

• 11th-Hour Superpower: Towards the end of the season he enslaves his father and other biochemists to work on ways to upgrade his power; from being able to control a dozen people at once to controlling hundreds, from having a range of a dozen feet to a dozen yards, from his orders lasting ten hours to lasting a full day (this last one permits him to use Luke as his spy despite Jessica's precautions) to working over a public address system (throwing everyone in a hospital at Jessica), and ultimately overcoming Jessica's immunity to his powers—although this last one is just Jessica faking him out for the few seconds it took to snap his neck.
• Abusive Parents: Subverted. He claims that his parents were scientists who used him as a guinea pig in their laborious and frequently painful neurology experiments, then they abandoned him at ten years old when his mind control powers developed. Or that's how he experienced it anyway, because they never told him what they were doing. His parents were experimenting on him to find a cure for a degenerative brain disease he was born with, and they succeeded, giving him his powers in the process. They only ran away after he made his mother burn her face with a clothes-iron in a fit of childish pique.
• Achilles' Heel: Surprisingly, several:
  • Surgical anesthesia shuts down the exact part of his brain that creates his powers, instantly ending any control he's currently putting out, and he'll still be without it for a while after waking up.
  • His power has limits. After twelve hours, if they're not in his immediate presence, his victims start to shake off the effects of his control. He also has to be in his victim's physical presence when giving orders, which means he can't control someone over the phone or via the internet, although he later overcomes this with 11th-Hour Superpower.
  • If someone he's controlling can be fooled into thinking they've completed their commands, or if they technically completed them (such as Trish being told to 'put a bullet in her head' and Jessica managing to harmlessly place a bullet in Trish's mouth) they'll stop. Presumably, this dependence on exact wording also means that his power only works if the person targeted understands the language he's speaking.
  • His power is useless if the intended victim can't hear him — such as someone wearing noise-cancelling headphones, or remaining outside the airtight room he gets sealed in at one point — and he obviously can't use his powers if he's unable to talk. Jessica uses a Mundane Solution to capture him by shoving a napkin into his mouth.
• Actor Allusion: In one episode Jessica tells Kilgrave: "You're not ten anymore." David Tennant's most famous role is as the Tenth Doctor from Doctor Who.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: Instead of having purple skin, he's an ordinary man who primarily wears purple clothing; it's his favorite color to wear and people affected by his mind control see the world covered in purple light. Although in the finale, he does start turning purple after getting a power boost, but even that is more subtle than the deep shade of his comic book version. In a more minor example, his hair and eyes are Tennant's natural brown, rather than the black or purple from the comics.
• Adaptation Name Change: His last name in the comics is made more subtle here through a slight change in its spelling (Kilgrave instead of Killgrave). It's later revealed that his real name is Kevin Thompson rather than Zebediah Killgrave.
• Adaptational Nationality: He's Croatian in the comics but British in the TV show.
• Adaptational Sympathy: Also downplayed. Unlike his comics counterpart, he cannot turn his power off, meaning that he has no choice but to control everyone he speaks to. This makes him slightly more sympathetic, as it ensures he could never lead a normal life.
• Adaptational Villainy: Zig-zagged, while his comic book counterpart humiliated Jessica in many more ways than in the TV show, the one thing Kilgrave didn't do was rape her. However, his reason for not doing so was not out of morality or pragmatism, but as part of his psychological torture of her. He still made her want to have sex with him like in the show, but he denied her with every chance he got and forced her to watch him raping other girls without ever partaking in it.
• Antagonist Abilities: Almost every one of the Main Characters is a much tougher physical threat than Kilgrave is; Jessica and Luke have Super-Strength, Simpson was military special operations who had participated in Super-Soldier experiments and is still on the short list to continue them before he became a cop, and even Trish has enough combat training to hold off Simpson for several minutes despite her slighter build. However, none of that means a damn thing because no matter how great their strength/skills are, Kilgrave's powers overrides the mind that controls them. One word, and your strengths and abilities are now his.
• And I Must Scream: His victims experience this. They don't want to do what he commands but they're utterly powerless to resist him and are in pure mental agony the entire time they're under his control.
• Arch-Enemy: To Jessica, having been haunting her for a good portion of her super life. He enslaved her for years, including subjecting her to constant rape, then using his Compelling Voice had her commit murder. The entirety of Season One is dedicated to bringing him down.
• Arc Villain: He is the Big Bad of the first season of Jessica Jones, having always been a looming presence over Jessica and everyone around her. Even after she kills him in the season finale, the psychological scars he has left her and her friends still lingers and Jessica even starts to hallucinate him being there.
• Ascended Fridge Horror: The series does not shy away from the longer-term effects of what someone like Kilgrave with powers like his could do to the world around him, going into detail the fates of those unfortunate enough to cross his path, have skills useful to him, piss him off or even just mildly annoy him.
• Asshole Victim: Jessica gives Kilgrave a well-deserved Neck Snap, a fitting end for a sociopathic rapist and manipulator. Especially since Jessica was one of his past victims.
• Atrocious Alias: After they find out his real name, Jessica and her allies find it ridiculous that he would name himself Kilgrave on purpose and joke he may as well called himself "Murdercorpse" or "Snuffcarcass".
• Ax-Crazy: He's a deranged man who commits acts of sadism and violence as easily as breathing. When he gets angry, which is often and with minimal provocation, no one is safe from his wrath.
• Bad Boss: To everyone he uses in his schemes, even people he isn't actively controlling. At one point, he orders two people to tear the skin off each other's faces if he doesn't return in a certain time and he is quite fond of forcing people to commit suicide when he no longer has any use for them.
• Bad Powers, Bad People: His ability is shown to be more or less inherently dangerous (even a simple thing like compelling someone to give him their jacket is shown as a traumatic violation), and it's also indicated that being able to get anyone you want to do anything you want anytime you want is so inherently corrupting that it'd be tough for anyone with such an ability to turn out normal, let alone good— especially since he developed his powers in childhood, and thus never learned about reciprocal relationships; as far back as he can remember, everyone in the world only exists to fulfill his desires.
• Bait the Dog: When he tries to get a new start with Jessica, he seems to make genuine efforts to improve, refusing to use his power to control her, buying her old house legally and hiring people to work for them rather than controlling them into doing it. It soon turns out that while he won't control Jessica directly, he has no problem about threatening to make the people he has hired kill or mutilate themselves if Jessica makes him unhappy. And to make it worse, it later turns out he wasn't really making an effort by refusing to control her directly: he just no longer can control her anyway.
• Beard of Evil: Kilgrave sports a five o'clock shadow which highlights his depraved personality.
• Believing Their Own Lies:
  • He's a textbook sociopath who routinely engages in Blaming the Victim and Gaslighting (manipulating a person into questioning their own sanity/validity of how they perceive the world around them). A major example is when Kilgrave adamantly claims to Jessica that he genuinely believed he had seduced her willingly, because he can't tell when he's using his mind control powers and when he isn't. All other evidence in the TV series indicates that he knows full well that his powers are on all the time, to the point that he has to carefully word mundane requests to people he doesn't explicitly want to control. The excuse that he doesn't even know if he's forcing people to do things appears to just be a half-hearted explanation he tells himself so he doesn't have to feel guilty about anything.
  • Apart from genuinely believing he's the real victim, and not guilty of anything, he also doesn't want to believe he uses mind control all the time out of pride. He refuses to acknowledge that he has "raped" dozens of people (in many cases literally) because he has truly convinced himself that he's such a likable demigod-like figure that people must or should adore him like that. In reality, even the few people he doesn't use mind powers on are still manipulated in some fashion (money, drugs, threats, etc.). Due to a lifetime of constantly having mind control powers (since he was 10 years old), he is laughably unskilled at having normal conversations with regular people whom he isn't manipulating through either mind control or other threats.
  • This is also one of his weaknesses, as he is very vulnerable to false praise. Well, zig-zagged: he is smart enough to be worried about people pretending to be under his mind control or praising him, but fundamentally, he has an unwavering belief that deep down, everyone wants to obey him, and Jessica obsessively loves him.
• Berserk Button: He really doesn't like being called a rapist.
• Big Bad: He's the main source of Jessica's problems. His status as primary antagonist is also lampshaded by Jessica when she says to Trish that she can only deal with "one Big Bad at a time", referring to the Psycho Serum enhanced Simpson.
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: He doesn't like the word "rape", despite it being exactly what he did to Jessica, Hope, and almost every woman he's encountered. He seems to acknowledge that's what he did when Jessica confronts him on this, but denies it at first and later mutters that he doesn't like what he does being described that way. That said, he later outright threatens to rape Trish in to goad a response of Jessica without any sugarcoating of it, proving that he is on some level very much aware of what he is doing.
• Blessed with Suck: Kilgrave gets to make a reasonably convincing argument that mind control could be a spectacularly-crappy super power that could cause untold damage to a person's relationship with reality. He has to parse his words very carefully to close the sale on the house, because he's trying to make an honest deal. (Ironically, he has to command the owner to keep the sale "above-board.")
  "I once told a man to go screw himself, can you even imagine?"
  • Kilgrave has lived his life as an isolated, nomad vagabond, because his powers ironically ensure that he cannot function as part of normal society.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: In the opinion of David Tennant, this is how Kilgrave should be seen — how can a man who has the power to make people do whatever he wants, perhaps even without meaning to, possibly be able to retain any normal sense of ethics? As far as he knows, everyone in the world is his absolute servant. That's his "normal"; the way the world is supposed to work. When Jessica fled him, it was if gravity stopped working, or the sun went out. It's all but stated that anyone would be warped and changed by this power, and would be unable to see the world the rest of humanity does. That he was ten years old and had been subjected to frequent and painful experimentation when he developed this power lends itself to this interpretation.
• Borrowed Catchphrase: Like the Tenth Doctor, Kilgrave has the occasional tendency to modify his statements with a stressed "Well."
• Breakout Villain: Easily the most popular character on Jessica Jones (2015), with David Tennant receiving critical acclaim for his portrayal. He was even featured in Rolling Stone's list of 40 greatest TV villains. Likely due to his popularity, he even manages to make a post-mortem appearance in Season 2.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Throughout the season, Jessica insists on not killing him because she needs him alive to prove that mind control is real to get Hope exonerated on her parent's murder by proving that he made her to do it and in that sense is not responsible for their deaths. Hope kills herself specifically to free Jessica from this burden.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Averted. Unlike his comic counterpart, he doesn't consider himself to be a particularly bad person, mostly because he's pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility.
• Celebrity Paradox:
  • Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has numerous Shout Outs to Doctor Who, as well as Harry Potter. David Tennant's best known role is as the Tenth Doctor, and before that he played Barty Crouch Jr. in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. It is also worth noting that David Tennant's first episode as the Doctor has him derailing the villain's plans by revealing that they were bluffing and that it is not possible to hypnotize someone into suicide...something Kilgrave is perfectly capable of doing.
  • After Kilgrave performs a Jedi Mind Trick, Jessica gives a Shout-Out to Obi-Wan Kenobi of Star Wars. David Tennant also had a guest role in the fifth season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars and would return in Ahsoka, specifically as Professor Huyang.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was referenced in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and Ms. Marvel (2022). David Tennant voiced Fugitoid in the 2012 series.
• Character Catch Phrase: "Smile."
• The Chessmaster: This is a given considering he can make anyone do anything he wants, whether it's directly through his Compelling Voice or indirectly through manipulation. Most prominently shown with the immense grasp he has over Jessica's life. Jessica even noted Kilgrave could make her do what he wanted without him saying a single command.
• Child Hater: When he invites himself in to a couple's home, the first thing he does is crush their young son's remote control car, declares that children should be neither seen nor heard, and then commands the kids to lock themselves in the closet while he helps himself to dinner. The girl of the pair has to go to the bathroom, but he just makes her pee in the closet.
• Color Motif: Heavily associated with the color purple.
• Comic-Book Movies Don't Use Codenames: Played with. He's being referred to as Kilgrave in press materials, rather than The Purple Man, his alias in the comics. Probably because unlike his comic incarnation, Kilgrave's skin isn't purple. Then it's later revealed "Kilgrave" is technically this version's codename, as his real name is Kevin Thompson.
• Compelling Voice: He has the power to make anyone do as he says, just by speaking. There are a few caveats (a maximum range, physical proximity, language barriers, wording, number of victims at once, etc.), but no real limits. His control violates even basic instincts like self-preservation.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Wilson Fisk is a gigantic juggernaut of a man, and the head of a vast criminal organization. Kilgrave is small, slight, reliant on his non-physical superpower, and operates entirely alone. Fisk has grand ambitions and semi-defensible motivations, if not methods, Kilgrave is all about his momentary wants and petty desires. Fisk regrets the harm caused by his methods, Kilgrave refuses to admit he's done anything wrong. Fisk desires only an honest and completely consenting relationship with the woman to whom he's attracted, Kilgrave is willing to use any unhanded means to force her into one. And so on, and so on...
• The Corrupter: "I've never killed anyone. Can you say the same?" Over the course of his spree, he turns Jessica, Jeri, Hope and Pam into accessories to murder. Of course, he was also responsible for the derailing of Jessica's crime-fighting career.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: He straight up makes Ruben commit a very messy Psychic-Assisted Suicide, when the latter blurts out that he loves Jessica. He is also not pleased when he meets Luke.
• Crazy-Prepared: He usually has several different people compelled to cover all his bases, and when he learns Jessica has found out his weakness, he also starts hiring security for real who will still protect him even with his powers turned off.
• Cultured Badass: Is Wicked Cultured and a lethally dangerous Manipulative Bastard.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Kilgrave suffered from a lethal degenerative brain disease and his parents tried to save him. Unfortuantely his parents' experiments drove him mad by accidentally giving young Kevin superpowers which twisted him into a manipulative and powerful sociopath.
• Death by Irony: In "AKA WWJD?", he whines that he's incapable of having a personal relationship with anyone—unable to determine if that's what they want, or if they're just following his commands. Jessica remembers: in the finale, Jessica mimes being under his control again, and Kilgrave is so blinded by happiness that he walks right into arm's reach of her, whereupon she pinches his mouth shut and snaps his neck.
• Dies Wide Open: After Jessica snaps his neck, his dead body's eyes remain open.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Most of his cruel actions are directed at people who simply made the mistake of annoying him or being in his vicinity when he's in a bad mood.
• Do Not Call Me "Paul": It doesn't come up much but he does not like being called by his birth name (Kevin).
• The Dreaded: Anyone who interacts with Kilgrave, especially Jessica, is utterly terrified of him.
• Drunk on the Dark Side: He's drunk on his power, and uses it for petty reasons.
• Enfante Terrible: When he got his powers, he changed from being a normal kid to one of these, torturing his parents, even making his mother burn herself with an iron, and eventually forcing them to abandon him. He, of course, will never mention any of this.
• Entitled to Have You: How he feels towards other people, particularly Jessica, is that they are his for the asking, and taking.
• Establishing Character Moment: Twice. Jessica's early PTSD-fueled visions of him sets up his obsession with Jessica. In his first appearance proper sets up his casual disregard for others as he takes over everything around him.
• Evil Brit: David Tennant uses an Estuary (East London) accent, the same as the Tenth Doctor. It reflects in his lingo, too: like "present arms!" when commanding cops to open fire on Jessica, or describing Jessica's flatmates as a bunch of "stroppy tosspots".
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good:
  • Jessica's attempts to teach him heroism are hindered by this. While he admits that Good Feels Good, he assumes that she does it for the grateful looks from the people she saves or to "balance the scales." Granted, she doesn't dispute either claim, but prior episodes have shown that her intentions aren't so selfish.
  • Also, on the night he enslaved Jessica after seeing her saving someone from thugs, he asks her whether she enjoyed it and why (using his powers to compel a truthful answer). When Jessica says that she liked it because it helped someone and made a difference, he is utterly bemused, having expected her to say that she enjoyed the violence or the feeling of power.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: He enjoys making creative commands to torture people with (like making a guy who called him out for cheating at poker bash his head repeatedly against a wall), and he really enjoys commanding them to stand still/sit/do some task until they wet themselves given how many times he does it.
• Evil Is Hammy: Like most of the MCU's villains, he's full of himself and will add scenery-chewing drama to his speech. Like when a damn phone goes off at the wrong time:
  Kilgrave: THE NEXT PERSON WHOSE PHONE RINGS HAS TO EAT IT! Crappy fluorescent lights and cockroaches and loud cell phones and the smell of piss! I am trying to profess eternal love here, people!
• Evil Is Petty: Is he ever! Most of the people who initially come forward about encounters with Kilgrave who aren't deluded or bullshitting reported him doing remarkably petty things like making them hand over an expensive jacket, play the cello for him for a couple of days (and injure their hands when he tires of them), or drive him around town for a week. He is also shown to frequently compel people to injure or even kill themselves just for slightly irritating or otherwise mildly inconveniencing him. Sometimes he doesn't even need his powers — he stomps on a kid's toy car just for being there.
• Exact Words: People follow his orders literally and directly. They take the shortest path, its based on their understanding and belief, and can be circumvented if you're quick and clever.
  • He complains at one point to Jessica that he has to take care with every word he says, otherwise he gets unfortunate results or uses his powers accidentally. The example he gives is when he told a man to go "screw himself".
  • This is also a method of thwarting his mind control. For example, Trish was told to put a bullet in her head, but Jessica just placed one in her mouth to end the control.
  • When Alva and Laurent are commanded to "clean up that mess", they don't go get a broom and dustpan, but kneel and start picking up the broken glass with their hands.
• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: His handsome appearance sharply contrast his utterly depraved and sadistic personality.
• Fatal Flaw: His obsession with possessing Jessica and his inability to grasp the feelings of the people around him is what ultimately leads to his death.
• Faux Affably Evil: Tennant's natural charm comes to the forefront when Kilgrave tells Jessica he loves her and tries to entice her with his domestic fantasy, but we're never allowed to forget how horrible he really is.
• For the Evulz: He can and will use his powers to make people do horrific things to themselves just because he's bored, or because they annoyed him somehow, or they have something he wants. One example is making a room full of card sharks give up a large amount of cash, then getting one that complains to smash his head against a wall. Exemplified when he's browsing magazines at a newsstand, while the owner insists "This isn't a library!" and demands he buy something.
  Kilgrave: Pick up that coffee. Throw it in your face.
• Freudian Excuse: His parents subjected him to frequent, painful experimentation. He interpreted this as them being willfully cruel. In fact, they were trying to save his life. They succeeded.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: It's made abundantly and repeatedly clear that, whatever happened in his childhood, it doesn't excuse any of his horrific actions as an adult and he's just using his past as a way to avoid taking responsibility for what a vile person he is.
  Kilgrave: I didn't have this... A home, loving parents, a family.
  Jessica: You blame bad parenting? My parents died. You don't see me raping anyone.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: He was once just a sick kid whose parents were desperate to save him.
• Glass Cannon: His potent mind control powers make him one of the most powerful and dangerous beings on Earth but despite his powers, he's only as strong and as durable as an normal human being and has no martial arts training so if someone manages to stop him from using his powers or is immune to them, he's completely powerless when they get their hands on him. Case in point, Jessica easily kills him in the season one finale by breaking his neck.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: He tries to do this with Jessica for most of "AKA WWJD?", but his overall creepiness and tendency to threaten to kill people when things don't go his way lend every moment an underlying current of menace.
• Gone Horribly Right: He was born with a degenerative brain disease. The attempts to cure him were painful, even torturous, but they succeeded. They also gave him his godawful powers.
• Good Feels Good: When Jessica pressures him into using his power to stop a hostage crisis, he himself is surprised it felt nice, largely because of the awe and admiration from the family he rescued. It doesn't last long though, and it's immediately clear to Jessica that he would never do such a thing of his own accord or because it's the right thing to do. Even when he's doing good things, it's for his own benefit.

H-O

• Hair-Trigger Temper: Kilgrave has a short fuse, which combined with his powers means bad news for anyone who does something to upset him, like talking at him.
• Hate Sink: Kilgrave is presented as an immature, misogynistic, possessive creep and sexual predator, as well as a petty, entitled, hedonistic individual who regularly mistreats other people for his amusement. Any superficial charm Kilgrave has only serves to underscore his unpleasantness.
• Hates Small Talk: He admits he's terrible at it, to the point it looks like he'd rather pass a kidney stone.
  Kilgrave: I've always been bad at small talk. I'm used to just saying things and they happen. (chuckles) Spoils you.
  Lin: Well, what a burden.
  Kilgrave: You have no idea.
• The Hedonist: Kilgrave insists on enjoying others' luxurious homes, wears sharp suits and only ever uses skilled chefs to prepare his food. He even appeared in Jessica's life with a woman on each arm.
• Human Resources: It's only mentioned once, but the doctor who performed his kidney transplant notes that the new kidneys are not a match, and thus he'll keep having to steal new ones every couple of years.
• If I Can't Have You…: If Jessica won't go back to him willingly and if he can't control her, he would kill her. He was too late for that.
• I Love You Because I Can't Control You: Well, he can, but his obsession with Jessica stems from the fact that despite having everything he wants he can't really have her affection. Turns out he can't control her at all anymore, which combined with her determination to kill him temporarily sours his feelings.
• Insane Troll Logic: Kilgrave is insistent that he's a good guy and that Jessica is a heartless bitch who he's a Love Martyr to. His arguments for why that is are... unconvincing to an unbiased listener.
• It's All About Me: One of the core aspects of his character. When attempting to woo Jessica he even repeatedly refers to his favorite foods as her favorite foods without an ounce of self-realization, which Jessica promptly corrects him on. The one time he does something good (saving a family from a hostage situation at Jessica's insistence), his positive reaction is based on how it made him feel, rather than any actual regard for the people he saved.
• Jedi Mind Trick: Lampshaded by Jessica when he wards off two cops. Naturally, he says that he is cooler than Obi Wan Kenobi.
• Jerkass: On top of being a psychotic rapist, Kilgrave has a very lacking interest in manners. He usually skips any semblance of charm when dealing with people and barks orders at them instead, knowing they have no choice but to obey him. While sitting in a crowded restaurant, he decides that it's too loud for his liking and simply shouts at everyone to shut up. Somewhat justified, due to not having a normal relationship since age ten.
• Just Giving Orders: Being a Psychopathic Manchild with the power to make other people do things for him, he repeatedly uses this excuse. Whenever Jessica calls him out on the trail of destruction he leaves behind (or anyone else capable of calling him out for that matter), he claims that he is not responsible for killing anybody because he has other people do the killing for him. Whenever someone points out that he compelled people to kill, he will try to gaslight them into thinking that it was somehow their fault. For example, Jessica confronts him that he made her kill Reva Conners, he claims that he only told her to "take care" of her, and that Jessica was the one who interpreted this as killing her.
• Just Think of the Potential!: Jessica genuinely does very briefly consider attempting to reform him to use his powers for good, since his ability is so powerful it could be used to really change the world for the better. Sensibly, she ultimately decides this is a stupid idea and attempts to take him out without bothering to wait for his sudden but inevitable betrayal.
• In Love with Your Carnage: Although he quickly comments on Jessica's overall attractiveness, he's especially amazed by her powers and watching her beat up a couple of thugs.
• Karmic Death: He gets his neck broken by Jessica, one of his many rape victims.
• Kick the Dog: Kilgrave performs acts of meaningless, petty cruelty as casually as breathing. Some of the more notable include having an annoying newsvendor scald his own face with hot coffee and having Ruben cut his own throat in Jessica's bed.
• Kids Are Cruel: As a child, he made his mother put an iron to her face in a tantrum. He says it was just an outburst and that he didn't really mean it.
• Kubrick Stare: He can pull off some truly menacing ones.
• Lack of Empathy: He's admitted to "not thinking twice" about those killed in his wake, and generally holds a sociopathic sense of self-absorption and apathy.
• Large Ham: Given Evil Is Hammy, he's self-absorbed, theatrical and prone to shout whenever he feels like it. Jessica's hallucinations of him in Season 2 are even hammier.
• Laugh with Me!: Whenever he keeps people around for social purposes (usually women as arm candy), he makes them smile and laugh with him.
• Laughably Evil: He is completely at sea when it comes to normal relations with others. His social ineptitude leads to some unexpected Cringe Comedy.
• Lean and Mean: He's a complete and utter bastard and played by the tall and naturally very thin David Tennant.
• Lecherous Licking: This was one of Tennant's first scenes with Ritter and it made him a bit uncomfortable, but "there it is in the script, black & white, gotta do it."
• Let's You and Him Fight: His MO against Jessica. With everyone else, he just orders them to do whatever he needs them to do. With her, he has to order other people to fight her or act as a distraction.
• Leitmotif: He is associated with a series of discordant and backmasked violin shrieks, which play whenever he uses his powers and when Jessica is tossing her apartment looking for the "gift" he left her after their meeting at the precinct.
• Logical Weakness: If his victims can't hear his orders, then they can't follow them. Jessica and Trish use this for the final confrontation to protect the latter. Additionally if his victims can be convinced they have completed his orders or they have technically done so, then they are freed, often taking his word literally. Additionally, his orders can only be followed if the person in question understands what he's saying, meaning his powers don't work on anyone who doesn't understand English.
• Manipulative Bastard: Aside from the use of his powers, he also uses more subtle methods to force people to do what he wants. Such as getting Malcolm hooked on drugs and dependent on him.
• Mind Rape: Kilgrave's specialty. What he did to Jessica traumatized her deeply, and she's just one of his many victims.
• Money to Throw Away: Dumping a sack full of $1.26 million at the feet of a stranger in exchange for their house. This is his grand gesture to Jessica.
• Moral Myopia: When it finally gets through to him that Jess doesn't, and will never, love him, he has the gall to feel betrayed and calls her ungrateful, then later accuses her of being the loveless sociopath.
• More than Mind Control: Played with, but ultimately defied. Kilgrave is convinced that he does this. His victims also state that, at the time they're fulfilling a command, all they can think about is how much they need to do what he says. But in fact, his victims are always silently screaming inside, and the Double Think involved with his powers is what traumatizes everyone in the end, no matter how small the request was.
• Murder the Hypotenuse:
  • When Ruben says he loves Jessica, Kilgrave commands him to lie down in Jessica's bed and cut his own throat.
  • When he finds out Luke is Jessica's former lover, he orders him to blow himself up while Jessica watches. But then it turns out he knew Luke would survive that, possibly meaning he tried to give him a similar fate to Ruben at some point.
• My Death Is Only The Beginning: He raises the possibility that he could have implanted commands in people that will activate upon his death, meaning Jessica can't risk killing him.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Lampshaded and mocked by both Jessica and Claire. ("Talk about obvious. Was Murdercorpse already taken?")
• Narcissist: And how. He is materialist, goes very aggressive with things related to his ego, considers himself a cool guy, believes he has the absolute right to control, abuse and/or punish others, loves to be praised and admired, and loves to impress and delight others. He is so obsessed with himself that he refuses to admit that his actions are horrible.
• Neck Snap: Jessica finally kills him by clamping one hand over his mouth and the other behind his head, and then twisting.
• Never My Fault: He is unwilling to take responsibility for what he forces people to do. He does a lot of victim-blaming, as well as Gaslighting. He repeatedly expresses the belief that him ordering someone to want something is the same as them actually wanting it, maintains that he has never killed anyone despite ordering others to do so or kill themselves, and doesn't considering compelling women to have sex with him as rape:
  • When he asks Luke if he is the one who screwed up his chances to get Jessica back, Luke answers that Kilgrave did that himself. Kilgrave, knowing that his powers compel people to always answer him completely honestly, sits dumbfounded for a brief moment before muttering to himself that he must "think of a fitting response to that."
  • One time he complains about Jessica's drinking problem, and gets indignant at the (true) rebuttal that it's the way she copes with what he did to her (although partially subverted since other flashbacks make clear Jessica had a drinking problem even before she met Kilgrave).
  • He concludes that the fact that Jessica doesn't love him must mean that she is utterly incapable of loving another person.
• Nice to the Waitress: He gives a random woman at a restaurant some cash after winning a poker game.
  Kilgrave: For the luck.
• No Challenge Equals No Satisfaction: He's thrilled when Jessica finds a way to neutralize his powers, forcing him to put effort into something for the first time since he got them. This makes him decide to not use them on her, and try to get her to come with him willingly. Ultimately subverted in that he really did want to control her and was more than happy to kidnap his father to try and find a way to upgrade his powers. He never decided not to use his powers on her; he just couldn't.
• Non-Action Big Bad: Justified, considering the nature of his powers, but Kilgrave never personally does any fighting, always having his thralls do his dirty work. He even uses this as a defense, believing that because he didn't technically murder or rape anyone in the traditional way, he's innocent.
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: He's pretty low-level in the grand scale of the MCU as his powers wouldn't work on most major heroes or villains in the franchise and he's normal human otherwise but his powers make him absolutely terrifying to normal people and street level heroes.
• No Social Skills: Kilgrave wholly relies on his Compelling Voice powers to interact with people and never bothers with being polite or following any normal social conventions. His insanity and lack of understanding of human interactions even gets him to accuse Jessica of being insane and incapable of love for not accepting him... the man who raped and enslaved her. Some of this lack is justified by the fact that he can't turn his powers off even if he wanted to. It takes immense effort from him to phrase things in such a way that it can't be taken as an order.
• Obliviously Evil: Kilgrave honestly isn't able to grasp the fact that he is a rapist and a murderer nor is he aware of or concerned with the trail of psychologically broken people he's left in his wake.
• Only One Name: Kilgrave is an alias he chose for himself — his real identity is a mystery until he reveals his past and Jessica does some digging. He is only ever referred to as that, and gives nor is called by any other name.

P-Z

• Playing the Victim Card: If his treatment towards other people, especially women wasn't horrible enough he has the gall to see himself as a victim, constantly using his backstory as an experimented child as an excuse to justify any of his atrocities.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Kilgrave has a low opinion of everyone, but women in particular he views as tools. He also likes using his power to compel women to smile.
• Poor Communication Kills: A big reason he became such a deplorable individual was because his parents routinely subjected him to horrific and painful experiments day after day as a small child. They were trying to find a cure for his brain disease, but they never told him this, causing him to hate and resent them. When he developed his powers, he wasted no time in forcing them to comply to his childish whims until they abandoned him at the age of 10.
• Posthumous Character: After Jessica accidentally kills someone and dumps his body in a river, either a fragment of Kilgrave lodged in her mind or merely her perception of him appears to congratulate her on taking the step to murder, on her own this time. He sticks around after that to taunt her and slowly drive her crazy.
• Power Incontinence: He can't turn off his powers. An off-hand remark by Kilgrave is enough to send a bystander into a suicidal loop. If he doesn't exercise rigorous control, he simply can't have a normal conversation. Of course, he almost never bothers with that sort of self-control.
  Kilgrave: I once told a man to go screw himself, can you even imagine?!
• Power Perversion Potential: The series explicitly and repeatedly calls Kilgrave a rapist for how he makes women want to have sex with him.
• Practically Joker: Has shades of this. He's unbalanced, manipulative and childish; he has an obsession with a gloomy, psychologically damaged hero(ine) who mostly wears black; he's abusive to the women in his life; he wears a purple suit; and he has a habit of telling people to "smile".
• Pragmatic Villainy: Kilgrave gets what turns out to be Jessica's old house legally, without using his powers or hurting anyone living there... because for the deal to stick and not give him problems later, he had to avoid both.
• Psychic-Assisted Suicide: Dozens of people kill or attempt to kill themselves at his command.
• Psychopathic Manchild: There's an impression that he never really grew up, particularly since he gained his powers as a child and his parents abandoned him when he was 10. Tantrums when he doesn't get what he wants, petty actions against those who annoy him, and shallow appreciation of others' feelings doesn't suggest a lot of maturity. Since he's so immature, he only thinks about his own gratification and doesn't give much thought to the idea of world domination, which he'd be capable of if he went about it the right way.
• Purple Is Powerful: Kilgrave is accompanied by the color purple no matter where he is, be it his predominately purple wardrobe or appearing with a flash of purple light when he's inside his victim's minds.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: This trope is one of the reasons why it took so long to adapt the Alias comic. Kilgrave himself feels this, as he rejects the idea that he raped Jessica, or anyone else, and comes up with justifications for how what he does isn't rape. He even says he hates the word. He also deliberately plays on this, threatening to do it to Trish to try and goad Jess in order to see if she's faking being under his control.
• Sadist: He loves ordering his victims to kill or hurt themselves, often for no reason, using increasingly horrific methods that he comes up with. Such as ordering a policeman to jump off a ledge, a man to splash scalding hot coffee on himself, a man to put his head through a wooden column, and two slaves to rip the skin off each others' faces.
• Schmuck Bait: During the final act of the season, Kilgrave desperately tries to increase his power so that rather than using trickery and manipulation, he can just reclaim Jessica by way of his powers. Knowing this, Jessica fakes being affected by his powered-up abilities when he gets the chance to directly use them on her. The thing is, Kilgrave was smart enough to realize that she would pull this trap, so he tries to goad her into revealing herself by stating how much he's going to rape Trish every day for the rest of her life. When that still doesn't make Jessica budge, his enthusiasm gets the better of him. The possibility that he'd finally gotten his fondest wish made him throw all that savvy out of the window and get close to Jessica. Cue Neck Lift, followed by Neck Snap.
• Self-Made Orphan: His parents abandoned him as a child after he had his mother maim herself in a tantrum. In the present, he has his mother stab herself with the pair of scissors that she tried to stab him with, while having another of his thralls cut his father's arms off and put them in a blender.
• Self-Serving Memory: When he reveals that he deliberately allowed Jessica to regain control to see if she really wanted to stay. Kilgrave's version of events is that Jessica chose to stay, but Jessica points out that she was about to jump off the balcony they were on, only Kilgrave stopped her. When he accuses her of this trope, Jessica reveals the scar left from Kilgrave telling her to cut her ear off.
  • This also comes into play with his parents. To hear him tell it, they experimented on him and tortured him then tossed him away like trash for no reason at all. His father is quick to remind him how he used his powers to control and terrorize them, and torture them, and made them fear for their safety.
• Serial Rapist: He raped Jessica and Hope and threatens to do the same to Trish at one point. He raped other women as well, given he was introduced with a woman on each arm who he was clearly controlling.
• Seven Deadly Sins: He's a serial rapist and obsessed with Jessica (Lust), he views people as tools to serve for his amusement (Greed), he thinks he did nothing wrong and believes his own lies that people appreciate him (Pride), he likes to gorge himself at the expense of others (Gluttony), he always makes his thralls do his own dirty work for him and refuses to accept his faults (Sloth), he wants Jessica badly because she is the one thing he cannot get (Envy), he is furious when he finds out that Luke and Jess were once lovers, throws violent fits, and kills scores of people (Wrath).
• Sharp-Dressed Man: He's typically seen wearing stylish suits, often purple.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: In "AKA WWJD", when Jessica crams a napkin in his gob to stop him talking, and again in "Smile", when she clamps his mouth shut.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Kilgrave swears a lot, befitting his short-tempered personality.
• The Sociopath: He claims to be able to love, but it's so twisted that its veracity is questionable. He readily admits that he does not give a damn about a single person other than himself and Jessica although he wants to reconcile with his parents. Even when he tries to profess his undying affection for Jessica, he first refers to her as a thing, and then a person.
• Sociopathic Hero: For all of about half an episode where he considers a crime-fighting career. He saves a woman and her kids from her husband who has taken them hostage, but he is still about to casually order the man to eat the barrel of his shotgun before Jessica manages to rein him in.
  Kilgrave: He will go to prison and feed off the tit of the taxpayer.
  Jessica: You've never paid a goddamn tax in your life!
  Kilgrave: ... Fair enough.
• Special Person, Normal Name: His real name is Kevin Thompson.
• Squishy Wizard: Kilgrave is well aware that he has no ability to face anyone, particularly Jessica, in a straight fight. So he has others do it for him. In the end, once Jessica gets her hands on him it's over in seconds.
• Stalker with a Crush: After Jessica escaped, he did everything he could to find her, setting up a network to keep her constantly under surveillance and tracked her constantly. Then, in an effort to woo her, he purchases her childhood home and recreates it, down to the photographs on the walls, from pictures he acquired from the realtor who sold it after her parents died.
• Super Supremacist: He has shades of this, having stated multiple times that he and Jessica belong together because they are both superpowerful.
• Superhero Movie Villains Die: Discussed. Simpson believes he's too dangerous to let live, but Jess originally objects due to needing him to prove Hope's innocence. Towards the end, she swears to kill him when it's clear that there's really no other option, and kills him in the finale. In the comics he survives the events of Alias, though the comics Marvel Universe is a lot better equipped to imprison superpowered criminals (not to mention far more aware of mind-control abilities).
• Tainted Veins: When he receives his final power boost, his veins turn purple.
• Tom the Dark Lord: He's a powerful, monstrous supervillain who was born with the utterly unremarkable name — Kevin Thompson.
• Too Powerful to Live: Kilgrave's Compelling Voice abilities are a frightening "elephant-in-the-room" in the context of the entire Marvel Universe, especially given the context that anyone and everyone could be a Kilgrave slave at any time and not even know it. As such, it was unlikely he would live beyond the first season, because the audience would have been second-guessing everything.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Like any bratty child, he refuses to try unfamiliar food, ordering his favorite pasta dish at every restaurant he enters (even forcing a Chinese chef to shlep around the block to borrow the ingredients from another eatery).
• Unreliable Narrator:
  • At one point he tells Jessica about a time she kissed him after he hadn't given any orders for 12 hours, framing it as a romantic moment that was completely within her free will. There's even a flashback to show this event. But Jessica quickly corrects him, saying that she remembers it as her being able to insult him for the first time, and that he ordered her to cut off her own ears in spite before relenting. The scar behind her ear backs up her version of the events, and Kilgrave looks shocked.
  • There's also his past. According to him, his parents performed cruel and inhumane experiments on him, then abandoned him when he developed his powers, leaving him to fend for himself. However, when we find his parents, it turns out he was dying of a degenerative brain disease, and the experiments were part of a clinical trial to cure him, though he didn't know that. His parents really loved him, but had to abandon him because he used his powers to torture and control them, which hit a breaking point when he permanently scarred his mother, and wrote it off as a 'tantrum'.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: When we see the recording of him undergoing the treatment, he seemed to be just a normal innocent child. This trope disappeared as soon as he got his powers.
• Villainous Breakdown: At the end of his first encounter with Jessica, losing his control over her, even briefly, devolved into Kilgrave chasing her into the street, screaming at her to come back to him, and being hit by a bus.
• Villainous Crush: His obsession with Jessica informs much of his villainy.
• Villain Has a Point: Kilgrave is absolutely right when talking about how he needs guidance if Jessica wants him to use his powers for good. He has no conception of morality, and genuinely thought having a crazed gunman blow his brains out was the right thing to do. And although nothing excuses his actions, he’s right when speaking about how lonely it would be to never know what a reciprocal relationship is like.
• Wants a Prize for Basic Decency: He acts like not treating people like insects is something noble.
• We Can Rule Together: His insistence that Jessica has some moral obligation to redeem him, to harness his abilities for good ("Dynamic Duo!"), turns out to be another form of manipulation.
• What Is Evil?: He considers himself not to be evil as he doesn't take pleasure from killing others, which is a pretty low standard to set. He even believes that he's never killed anybody. Apparently, ordering them to kill themselves doesn't count in his mind.
• Wicked Cultured: One could ascertain this about him based on his wardrobe and appreciation of fine foods, although as with everything else in his life, he obtains it all through his mind control.
• With Great Power Comes Great Perks: Kilgrave has no Evil Plan to Take Over the World, simply using his powers for his own hedonistic pleasure.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Deconstructed. Kilgrave explains to Jessica that the reason why he became the monster he is today is because his parents performed painful experiments when he was a child and abandoned him. He doesn't get much sympathy however because, while the experiment might have given him his powers with the abandonment impacting his view of the world, they DO NOT excuse him in committing such cruelty, like turning innocent women into Sex Slaves and raping them. It's revealed that his parents were performing those experiments to try save him from a neurotic disease he had and would have died if they didn't perform them. They didn't tell him that, however. His powers were a side effect of it and the reason why they abandoned him was because he was using his powers to torture them. In the end, despite his ordeal, he was simply a horrible human being who simply refuses to be at fault for any wrongdoings and instead, uses this trope as an excuse to try and justify his atrocities.
• Would Hit a Girl: He's mind-controlled several women and even raped some of them too. Jessica and Hope would attest to this.
• Would Hurt a Child: He commands two children to get in a cupboard and to urinate there, and even forced a man to leave his toddler son in the street so that he could drive to where he needed to go.
• Yandere: The transition is slower than most examples; it takes place over the course of the entire season. He starts off with a terrible Villainous Crush on Jessica after seeing her beat up some thugs and later has her murder Luke Cage's wife. Returning to Jessica's life after a kidney transplant due to a bus crash, Kilgrave starts displaying the "I just want to get back together" attitude with her. After his ploy with reconstructing her house fails, his sanity begins to deconstruct and he begins developing a rage towards her and anyone who loves her in any sense, which is not helped by her immunity to his powers. By the end of the series, he comes back full circle and shows the old crush attitude on Jessica... only to find out it was a ruse before getting his neck snapped.
• You Could Have Used Your Powers for Good!: In "AKA WWJD?", Jones twists his arm into helping her defuse a domestic violence/hostage situation. While she manages to keep him from killing anybody, it becomes obvious that all he cares about is the endorphin rush it gave him and he would otherwise be incapable of making these decisions without her scrutinizing him 24/7.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: He tends to throw away his human puppets like used rags, especially if there's no pragmatic reason for him to do this.
• Zerg Rush: Kilgrave's go-to tactic against Jessica is to simply order anyone he encounters to attack her or endanger themselves, slowing her down while he has time to escape.

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"Tell me you love me."