Character page for the 2018 film The Predator.
For the other character pages for the Predator franchise, see here.
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Humans
The Loonies
Quinn
Quinn McKenna
Portrayed By: Boyd Holbrook
Emily’s ex-husband, the father of Rory, and an Army Ranger sniper who discovers the existence of the fierce Predators but finds that no one believes they exist.
- Ambiguous Situation: Predator: Hunting Grounds reveals Project Stargazer was shut down due to the Fugitive Predator's escape, and it rebranded itself as a terrorist group selling Predator tech. As Quinn is shown leading the project at the end of the film, this places a big question mark on his whereabouts.
- Cold Sniper: His role back in the Army. The coldness is only on the job, given he has a family, and he's very affectionate with his son.
- Elites Are More Glamorous: He's a Captain in the U.S. Army's elite 75th Ranger Regiment. The man has seen action on five continents and has over a dozen confirmed kills.
- Only Sane Man: Surprisingly, the government doesn't think he's crazy, but simply passes him off as such to keep the existence of the Predators secret. He is definitely this amongst his Ragtag Bunch of Misfits, however.
- Papa Wolf: He claims not to enjoy killing... unless you threaten his son.
- Ranger: He's a Captain in the U.S. Army's 75th Ranger Regiment. As such, he's a bonafide badass with extensive combat credentials.
- Sole Survivor: Of his team at the beginning of the movie, and of his second "team" (minus Brackett) by the end.
- Stomach of Holding: He does this with the cloaking device before being apprehended. He later goes to the bathroom to bring it back up.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Even if there hadn't been two kill-crazy alien lifeforms looking for the Predator-Killer armor, it being shipped to the house of his clueless wife and son, the latter of whom is a genius when it comes to technology, couldn't have ended well. If only Quinn had been keeping up the payments on his PO Box...
Nebraska
Gaylord "Nebraska" Williams
Portrayed By: Trevante Rhodes
A former Marine who joins the rest of the psychologically-unfit Loonies in an unofficial Predator-hunting operation headed by Quinn.
- Bungled Suicide: Earning himself a place in Group 2, he shot himself in the head, but didn't quite finish the job.
- Dying Moment of Awesome: He performs a Heroic Sacrifice to take down the Predator's spaceship with guns blazing and a smile on his face.
- Dying Smirk: He throws himself into the turbine of the Predator's spaceship with guns blazing and a smile on his face.
- Embarrassing First Name: Quinn even notes he did well in being called Nebraska instead.
- Scary Black Man: He's quite an intimidating presence.
- Smoking Is Cool: He's rarely seen without a cigarette.
- Turbine Blender: He willingly does this in a Heroic Sacrifice to bring down the Predator's ship and allow Quinn and Bracket to finish it off.
Coyle
Coyle
Portrayed By: Keegan-Michael Key
A former Marine who teams up with Quinn to fight the Predators.
- Mercy Kill: How he and Baxley finish each other off.
- Sad Clown: He uses humor to deal with the fact that he accidentally killed a number of his comrades in a friendly fire incident.
- Semper Fi: His jacket indicates that he's an ex-Marine."C'mon, let's go before these Army guys fuck everything up."
- Torso with a View: The Ultimate Predator fires at him and opens a hole in his abdomen.
Baxley
Baxley
Portrayed By: Thomas Jane
A military veteran from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars who is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
- Abled in the Adaptation: The novelization removes his Hollywood Tourette's.
- Hollywood Tourette's: He exhibits a less-exaggerated version of this.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: His ultimate fate, being skewered on a tree branch by the Ultimate Predator.
- Mercy Kill: How he and Coyle finish each other off.
Lynch
Lynch
Portrayed By: Alfie Allen
A former Marine who teams up with several other outsiders, including Quinn, to stop the human-hunting Predators in suburbia.
- An Arm and a Leg: An arm, anyways. He does retain his composure enough, however, to warn the others.
- Sacrificial Lamb: He's the first of the Loonies to die.
- Token Minority: Not in a racial sense but in a nationality sense, as he's the only non-American in the team.
Nettles
Nettles
Portrayed By: Augusto Aguilera
A former Blackhawk helicopter pilot who suffered a traumatic brain injury from a crash.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: When the Predator ship's shields start to cover the hull, he does not dive over or under it, and is cut in half.
- Stalker with a Crush: He shows signs of this towards Casey, though it's not malicious.
- Throwing Your Sword Always Works: He kills one of Traeger's men with a thrown knife to the chest.
Project Stargazer
Traeger
Will Traeger
Portrayed By: Sterling K. Brown
An agent who jails Quinn to keep him quiet about the Predators, but later needs his help to fight them off.
- Asshole Victim: He's an arrogant and corrupt government agent who kills himself with the alien technology he attempted to exploit for his own gains.
- Bad Boss: He immediately tries to have Casey killed when things go wrong during the Fugitive Predator's escape (though to be fair, she had stolen its extracted spinal fluid). He also kills his own man after the latter loses his hand to a piece of Predator tech to stop him from screaming and giving away their position.
- Big Bad Wannabe: He could barely handle the regular Predator, so when the Ultimate Predator shows up, he's horribly out of his league.
- Composite Character: Of Dillon from the first film and Peter Keyes from the second film. All three characters are corrupt government agents with selfish agendas, while both Dillon and Traeger are Black.
- Enemy Mine: He forms an alliance with Quinn upon realizing the threat the Ultimate Predator poses to all of them.
- Greed: He really wants the alien technology for himself and his group for their own selfish gain and profit.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: He accidentally blows his own head off with the plasma caster he was using.
- Idiot Ball: He thought he knew how to use the plasma caster without any training. This is how he gets himself unceremoniously killed at the end when he accidentally uses the plasma caster to blow his own head off.
- Jerkass Has a Point: He accurately guesses the reasons for the Ultimate Predator's killing the Fugitive, and later on argues against the group splitting up, as he knows from studying Predator encounters it'll take them out one by one if they do.
- Oral Fixation: He's almost always seen chewing some type of gum.
- The Men in Black: He describes his job as 'acquisitions', seemingly of alien lifeforms or evidence."I look up and I catch what falls out of the sky."
- Smug Snake: He thinks he's got everything under control, but he doesn't.
Brackett
Casey Brackett
Portrayed By: Olivia Munn
A disgruntled college professor and biologist who joins the crew's mission.
- Action Girl: She doesn't hesitate to hunt down a Predator with a tranquilizer gun, and during the finale, it's her getting the drop on the Ultimate Predator that distracts it long enough for Quinn to finally finish it off.
- Better with Non-Human Company: She's an animal lover with a dislike for interacting with people.
- Idiot Ball: For all her intelligence and resourcefulness, Casey decides to steal a vial of spinal fluid from Project Stardust during the Predator's escape. This puts a target on her back, as she knows too much.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: When the Predator escapes the Project Stargazer lab, Traeger orders her terminated, both because she's seen too much and because she's stolen the vial of the Predator's spinal fluid.
Keyes
Sean Keyes
Portrayed By: Jake Busey
The son of Peter Keyes, he's the head of the OWLF government program studying the Fugitive Predator.
- Ascended Extra: Predator: Hunting Grounds gives him a big role by having him narrate the collectible audio logs that connect the films together.
- Casting Gag: Sean Keyes is played by the son of his father's actor, Gary Busey.
- Death by Adaptation: He's killed by the Fugitive Predator in the novelization during the break-out, having his head and hand torn off. In the finished film, he can be seen (in a blink-and-you-miss-it moment) being shot with a single round as the Predator fires the stolen rifle wildly while Bracket escapes, but his ultimate fate is left unaddressed.
- Dragon Ascendant: He replaced his father as the head of the OWLF program following his death, although he was demoted to a Mauve Shirt when Project Stargazer replaced it.
- Horrible Judge of Character: The audio logs in Predator: Hunting Grounds show him to be very admiring of his father, who was a shady government agent.
- Intergenerational Friendship: He forms one with Dutch in the Predator: Hunting Grounds audio logs.
- Like Father, Unlike Son: Unlike his corrupt Jerkass father, who ends up as an eventual Asshole Victim, Sean is a honest Nice Guy and survives a Predator attack.
- Mauve Shirt: It's not clear whether he survives when the first Predator breaks containment and slaughters most of the guards and scientists, as he's shown being shot in the background and going down as Bracket escapes the lab.
- Nice Guy: Unlike his arrogant Jerkass father, Sean is quite pleasant.
- Non-Action Guy: Another contrast to his father is that while Peter had combat skills, Sean does not. In the Predator: Hunting Grounds audio logs, this was invoked during his time in the OWLF program, as he was brought in as a non-combatant observer to watch a Predator encounter.
- Redeeming Replacement: It's hard to believe that the shady Peter Keyes had a Nice Guy son like Sean replace him in the OWLF program.
Other Humans
Emily
Emily McKenna
Portrayed By: Yvonne Strahovski
Quinn's estranged wife and the mother to Rory.
- Action Mom: When told her son is in danger, she immediately goes to grab a hunting rifle to go rescue him. Even if Quinn tells her to stay behind, she still gives Stargazer's men a hard time.
- Amicable Exes: While she still dislikes Quinn for being a terrible husband and father, she still sees him as a great soldier, and immediately trusts him when he tells her straight to her face that an alien is out there hunting their son.
Rory
Rory McKenna
Portrayed By: Jacob Tremblay
Quinn and Emily's troubled autistic son, who is bullied in school, and becomes a key player in the fight against the Predators due to his preternatural ability to learn languages and understand unfamiliar technology.
- Disability Superpower: He's shown to be a savant when he restores a number of chessboards from memory. And then he decodes how a Predator wrist computer works from scratch...
- Hollywood Autism: Rory’s autism is treated as some kind of superpower, with the film going as far as to call it “the next step in human evolution”. In fact, the Predators even want him for his autism, feeling as though it makes him the “ultimate warrior”.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: His putting on the Predator armor with the intention of wearing it as a Halloween costume not only results in him accidentally blowing up someone's house, it also leads both Predators right to his neighborhood.
- Worthy Opponent: The Ultimate Predator considers him to be this due to his ability to figure out Yautja technology. When it challenges the surviving humans in the end and designates "McKenna" as their leader and its prize, it's talking about Rory — not his father Quinn.
Predators
Fugitive Predator
The Fugitive Predator
Portrayed By: Brian A. Prince
- Cool Helmet: As is traditional for Predators, but the Fugitive Predator has a few new tricks, including the red targeting lasers being able to form a plasma cannon in addition to the traditional shoulder setup.
- Defector from Decadence: It defected from its own people, as they plan to invade Earth, though the exact reasons why are left vague.
- Disc-One Final Boss: The main antagonist of the first half of the film, tracking down Rory and the Loonies to recover its lost gear. Then the Ultimate Predator shows up...
- Heinz Hybrid: Though to a lesser extent than the Ultimate Predator, it has been genetically augmented with the DNA of countless species — including humans. If what Rory McKenna saw in the Predator mask is any indication, the augmentation was not voluntary.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Quinn getting hold of its tech leads to the Fugitive getting knocked out by its own weaponry.
- Idiot Ball: It came to Earth to give the humans an advanced suit of armour that will allow them to fight back against its people - but after it crashes, the first thing it does is hunt and kill Quinn's team in traditional Predator fashion, leading to its losing its tech and subsequent capture by Stargazer.
- A Lighter Shade of Black: Compared with the Ultimate Predator. It massacres Quinn's military unit and the Stargazer staff without mercy, but thereafter it avoids killing the Loonies when it easily could (it even fires a warning shot from its shoulder cannon), and only threatens Rory to get the others to give it back its tech. It's revealed that it's — nominally at least — on the side of the humans, having gone rogue to deliver an advanced suit of weaponized Predator-killing combat armor to Earth.
- Noble Demon: It has genuinely good intentions — coming to Earth to slip the humans a suit of powered armour so they can defend themselves against the oncoming Predator invasion — but still kills a lot of people along the way, and poses almost as much of a problem for the Loonies in the first half of the film as the Ultimate Predator does in the second.
- Powered Armor: This Predator's body armor covers far more of its body than the Predators from the previous films, and is seemingly more technologically advanced.
- To Serve Man: When escaping the Project Stargazer lab, it grabs one of the scientists' arms with its mandibles and then bites a chunk out of it.
- The Worf Effect: While this Predator easily manhandles humans, the Ultimate Predator makes its entrance by neck lifting the Fugitive Predator, shrugging off its attacks, and caving its head in with a single blow.
Ultimate Predator
The Ultimate Predator
Voiced By: Lex Lang (uncredited)
- Adaptational Wimp: In the novelization, it lacks the dermal armor of its film counterpart and simply wears traditional Predator armor.
- An Arm and a Leg: Rory accidentally activates his ship's force field while it is outside, severing its arm. Later, an explosion blows off its other arm and both its legs.
- Arm Cannon: Its plasma caster and spear launcher are arm-mounted.
- Barehanded Blade Block: It does this to the Fugitive Predator with such force it actually shatters the smaller Predator's wrist blades.
- Big Bad: The true antagonist of the film.
- Blood Knight: In the film's finale, it challenges the humans to a hunt, intending to claim Rory as a trophy.
- Boom, Headshot!: Quinn delivers the Coup de Grâce by shooting the Ultimate Predator in the head several times with his pistol.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: It utterly demolishes its regular counterpart in a fight, easily tossing it around and caving its head in within seconds.
- Cyborg: Its eyes appear to be technologically augmented, since it doesn't need to wear a mask to lock onto targets.
- Evil Is Bigger: The Ultimate Predator is eleven feet tall and has digitigrade feet, towering over the seven foot-tall regular Predator.
- The Heavy: It's acting on behalf of its superiors, who sent it to dispatch the rogue Fugitive Predator and recover the Predator-Killer suit.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: How it is defeated at the end; it has its arm cut off by its ship's force field, one of its hounds sided with the humans, and it's stabbed by his own wrist blade launched from his own arm.
- Hunter of His Own Kind: It was dispatched to execute the Fugitive Predator, who had stolen a suit of advanced body armor to give to the humans.
- I Have Many Names: While in the movie itself it gets no distinctive name, promotional material called him "Ultimate Predator", the novelization "Upgrade Predator" and his merchandise "Assassin Predator".
- Immune to Bullets: The Predators from the previous films were a lot tougher than humans and could shrug off pistol fire or unaimed stray hits from higher-caliber weaponry, but they were still organic beings, and a few shotgun blasts to the torso was still at least a moderately serious injury to one. The Ultimate Predator is a cyborg with some sort of sub-dermal armor that lets it laugh off sustained assault rifle fire like it's nothing.
- Knight of Cerebus: The movie's hardly a comedy, but there's at least a few laughs and bonding moments with the Loonies. Things get much grimmer when the Ultimate Predator shows up, particularly during the climax when it announces it's going to hunt and kill the Loonies and Stargazer guys alike.
- Punch-Clock Villain: Once it's accomplished his goals (destroying the Fugitive Predator's ship and kidnapping Rory), it elects to simply leave the planet without dealing with the surviving humans and return to its home planet, implying that it's more goal-oriented than anything else. Ironically, this turns out to be its downfall, as if it had stayed and killed Quinn and the other surviving humans, there would've been nothing between it and freedom.
- Rabid Cop: Played with. Given that it's implied to be some form of Space Police, it comes across as this due to barely interrogating the other Predator about the stolen technology before killing it via smashing its head in. There's also how it states it enjoyed watching Quinn's Ragtag Bunch of Misfits and the corrupt government agency kill each other. On the other hand, if it is some kind of law enforcement, it'd have to be hardcore to keep order when the average member of society is a 7-foot killing machine and they're all a Proud Warrior Race.
- Sadist: It blows off Lynch's arm when it easily could have simply shot him in the back of the head while cloaked (it deliberately shifts aim), and later admits in its message it enjoyed seeing the humans kill each other.
- Super-Toughness: In addition to its sparse body armor, it can manifest an exoskeleton underneath its skin that makes it capable of casually shrugging off gunfire and even shattering the Fugitive Predator's wrist blades.
- To Serve Man: It doesn't hesitate to use his mandibles and teeth in combat, biting the throat out of a soldier it snares.
- Would Hurt a Child: It is willing to abduct Rory so the Predators can harvest his DNA.
