Character page for The Accountant.
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The Accountant
Christian Wolff / "The Accountant"
Played by: Ben Affleck, Seth Lee (as a young child)
Dubbed by: Boris Rehlinger (European French)
A brilliant accountant who has been diagnosed with autism in his childhood. After putting an end to his military career, he makes a living off creative accounting and forensic accounting in big legal and illegal businesses alike. The extensive training he went through since his childhood in both hand-to-hand combat and firearms made him high-functioning, and it also helped him to survive in the criminal underworld.
- Anti-Hero: Wolff is ultimately revealed as one, given that he goes out of his way to protect Dana and the fact that he informs on his criminal clients to King. He also goes out of his way to help the elderly farmers who came in for a consult despite his tax business being a front.
- Badass Bookworm: He is a prodigious genius when it comes to math and handling of money. He's also an expert marksman, and an incredibly tough hand-to-hand combatant.
- Broken Ace: Christian Wolff is a mathematical genius of the highest order, even being compared to Albert Einstein and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart when he was only a child. He's also been martially trained to a razor's edge and is a one-man commando unit. But it's clear that he suffers from a condition that ranges from obsessive compulsive disorder to lack of social skills.
- Brutal Honesty: Christian sometimes veers into this due to his autism reducing his social awareness.
- Character Name Alias: "Christian Wolff"
is just one of his numerous aliases, all of them famous mathematicians. Others he's used are Carl Gauss and Lou "Lewis" Carroll. - Charles Atlas Superpower: Played With. Because of his autism, he is oversensitive to touch, sound, and light stimuli. This would have resulted in him being an absolute wreck in most situations, but due to his father's notably brutal Training from Hell (particularly a training regimen that desensitizes him to it by intentional overload, which he sticks to even in adulthood) he effectively has Super-Senses — and Nerves of Steel in the chaos of combat. This combined with equally well-trained physical prowess and weapons proficiency results in a combatant who could easily keep pace with many comic-book superhumans (and probably with that superhero Affleck has played at the time). However, his mathematic/pattern-matching skills are shown from childhood to be directly tied to his autism.
- Child Prodigy: A young Wolff was able to assemble a pretty complex puzzle of Muhammad Ali face down.
- Code Name: The Voice nicknames him "Dreamboat".
- Cold Sniper: He's a deadly marksman, especially with his Barrett M82 rifle.
- Combat Pragmatist: His fighting style is built around brutal efficiency above all else and he will use anything he can as a weapon and his sheer size and strength to easily overpower opponents.
- Disability Superpower: Taken to the logical extreme. As a child, "Christian Wolff" is diagnosed with severe — many would call it crippling — autism. The diagnosing therapist recommended he be placed on an accelerated academic path at a specialized school void of the situations which stress him. His father — an intelligence officer in an unidentified agency — agreed with the accelerated schooling, but insisted that his son had to learn to live in the world despite its harshness and chose instead to put him on a confrontation therapy regime to desensitize him; to the point of having him trained in various forms of combat and weapons training. As an adult, he treats everything he does with precision and MUST complete a job. In combat? He is capable of slaughtering dozens of experienced mercenaries in minutes.
- Genius Bruiser: Autistic mathematical savant who uncooks books for criminals for a living (and knows how to effectively outlive his usefulness to them), trained to overcome his Sensory Overload problem, giving him Nerves of Steel, and retaining Training from Hell that his father put him through. Sprinkle some formal US Army training on top and you get a Lightning Bruiser as well.
- Handicapped Badass: He is autistic, albeit a very high-functioning and highly trained one in both marksmanship and a deadly Indonesian martial art called silat. He still has to calm himself down in highly stressful combat situations with his "Solomon Grundy" nursery rhyme / mantra.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: Invoked but downplayed by Wolff. He acknowledges that he's different and has trouble socializing, but he wants to. He generally likes people, as his Establishing Character Moment shows. When he finds people he connects with, like Dana or Francis, he becomes protective. How much of his difficulty is due to his autism and how much is due to his Abusive Parents is unclear.
- Improbable Aiming Skills: Christian is shown to be a crack sniper, but at one point he holds a Barett while standing and walking to shoot out the engine block of a moving truck. Granted, the truck was not far and Christian has exceptional strength, but the M82 is a large, awkward rifle to use.
- Lightning Bruiser: He's big and muscular but surprisingly quick and agile, able to easily pull off BJJ style flips and rolls and making him incredibly dangerous in a fight.
- No Social Skills: Wolff confesses to Dana that he has difficulty socializing despite wanting to. His father never tried to teach him any and what little he possesses in terms of etiquette and empathy was taught to him by Francis who he wasn't able to spend that much time with.
- No Name Given: "Christian Wolff" is just one of the Accountant's several aliases; his real name goes unrevealed by the film's end.
- Neurodiversity Is Supernatural: On the low end; his autism expresses itself as extraordinary symbolic/numeric pattern-matching ability and an equally extraordinary terror of intense sensations such as bright lights, loud noises and most forms of physical contact. Thanks to his father's training regime, he has an ironclad grip on his sensory terrors, while his pattern matching ability is both the datamining equivalent of Fingerprinting Air and the tactical equivalent of Solid Snake's Enemy-Detecting Radar.
- Secretly Wealthy: He's rich, but lives with frugality. In a house surrounded by cameras and a Gatling gun nest. However, save for the high security, the house is just for appearance's sake; it has no furniture save a bed, a chair and a table in the kitchen. The kitchen drawers only contain a single knife, fork and spoon. His Airstream trailer is where his heart is; a luxury bed in a soundproofed room, drawers full of high value goods such as gold bullion, works of art (a Jackson Pollock most notably) and the #1 issue of Action Comics (which is worth millions). Oh, and a drawer full of paper currency in high denominations; $50,000 in American currency alone, along with a stash of euros. He donates the majority of his funds to an autism treatment institute that he was brought to as a child, which is also where his Mission Control, Justine, resides.
- Simple, yet Awesome: His main fighting style is Pencak Silat which is built around ending a fight as quickly as possible rather than looking flashy. He also uses methods from Krav Maga, Muay Thai, Systema, Judo and Brazilian Jiujitsu which are all built around similar principles.
- The Stoic: Justified by his condition, of course.
- Kind of subverted when he is unable to finish his work with Living Robotics accounts.
- Strong and Skilled: He's very big and muscular and an outstanding combatant who shows skill in Judo, BJJ, Karate, Muay Thai, Krav Maga, Pencak Silat, Boxing and Wrestling.
- Training from Hell: What Wolff's father put him and his brother through as kids. Also, the sensory overload (flashing lights, loud noises, physical pain) Wolff inflicts on himself every day as a way to maintain his mental discipline to be functional.
Dana
Dana Cummings
Played by: Anna Kendrick
The in-house accountant of Living Robotics.
- Action Survivor: Two professional killers enter her apartment, and joke about how they should have brought "the smaller box" to put her in. Then she clocks one guy across the face with a stove grille, retreats to the bathroom and hits him again with the toilet tank lid. Of course if Wolff hadn't arrived in time she'd most certainly have wound up in that box, but she acquitted herself quite well considering the odds and despite having no combat training.
- Brainy Brunette: She's a brunette and an accountant. She lags a bit behind Wolff, but he's a mathematical savant to begin with and she's more neuro-typical. She can perfectly understand Wolff's conclusions and found the discrepancy to begin with.
- Broken Pedestal: Downplayed, but she's a little shaken to find out the truth about Christian.
- Combat Pragmatist: Given her small size and lack of combat training and her opponents being much larger and highly trained, she has to resort to dirty moves to get by in a fight and buy herself time.
- Cute Clumsy Girl: She's cute, friendly, enthusiastic, a bit clumsy when talking to Christian Wolff, and she's played by the petite Anna Kendrick. So much so, in fact, that she manages to bring out Christian's own dorky side when they geek out over his work on Living Robotics' finances.
- Endearingly Dorky: As is standard for Anna Kendrick. Christian finds himself won over almost instantly by her nerdy charm.
- Follow in My Footsteps: Her father was an accountant, and so is she. However, Dana admitted that she wanted to study art but her father told her that art doesn't pay the bills.
- Nice Girl: Dana is a very friendly and charming young woman who it is difficult not to like.
- Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Two professional killers enter her apartment, and joke about how they should have brought "the smaller box" to put her in. Then she clocks one guy across the face with a stove grille, retreats to the bathroom and hits him again with the toilet tank lid. Of course if The Accountant hadn't arrived in time she'd have still wound up in that box, but she acquitted herself quite well considering the odds, and definitely avoided being the Damsel.
- She Knows Too Much: She ends up on a hit list due to being aware of the embezzlement going on at Living Robotics thanks to Christian, who immediately works to get her to safety.
Braxton
Braxton
Played by: Jon Bernthal
Christian Wolff's allistic brother. He started off as a soldier then became a private military contractor.
- Affably Evil: He's a ruthless killer, but he isn't a monster. Notably, when he tells Chilton that he's going to die, it will be via a relatively painless insulin overdose. However should he refuse to do so, Braxton states he would have to violate and kill his wife as well to make it look like a home invasion. When he notices Chilton's horrified reaction to this, he immediately backtracks and assures him that he won't physically touch his wife, but reminds him that if he doesn't overdose on his meds, he will still kill her.
- His affable nature can also be seen earlier when talking to the Corrupt Corporate Executive as if they were old friends whilst beating the shit out of him.
- Big Brother Instinct: Which is so great that he betrays his own employer.
- Everyone Has Standards:
- He is disgusted by the crimes of the Corrupt Corporate Executive and has no qualms manhandling the jerk.
- When talking with Ed Chilton about how the need to stage a home invasion rather than the planned diabetic overdose would require killing his wife as well, Braxton initially mentions violating Chilton’s wife but then immediately ‘apologises’ with the assurance that he wouldn’t go that far, even if he makes it clear that she would have to die in that scenario.
- When he finds out that his brother is the guy trying to kill his employer, he immediately turns on his boss and kills one of his own men to protect him, just so that he can confront his brother.
- He's shocked when Wolff ruthlessly executes Blackburn in the middle of a rant.
- Evil Sounds Deep: He's a ruthless hitman with Jon Bernthal's famous gravelly voice.
- Genius Bruiser: He's a very skilled combatant and very intelligent.
- Hates Their Parent: He flipped off his own mother when she abandoned him, his brother, and his father. He also has some hatred towards his own father for the Training from Hell he had to endure from him. And not to mention that both his mother's departure and his father's death were indirectly caused by his brother's autism disorder, it caused him to break off any ties with his brother until the climax.
- Heel–Face Turn: He ends up letting Wolff kill Lamar Blackburn, his own employer.
- Mook Lieutenant: He has a private army of contractors.
- No Name Given: Just as Christian, his real family name is never revealed.
- Private Military Contractors: He is a former soldier and turned to private contracting. He and his small private army are hired as protection by Living Robotics CEO Lamar Blackburn.
- Professional Killer: Killing people can be part of his job.
- Punch-Clock Villain: His own men come close to killing Dana and himself is a Professional Killer, but it's just a job for him and he's not inherently a bad person. Upon finding out the man he has to protect Lamar Blackburn from is his own brother, the job no longer matters for him and he goes as far as killing one of his own men who refuses to stand down, then not intervening when Wolff kills his employer.
- Training from Hell: Their father put him and Christian through the same hellish training to become killing machines.
- Vigilante Man: Though he's paid for it. At one point, he is ordered to threaten a Corrupt Corporate Executive whose one too many White-Collar Crime caused a lot of people to become jobless.
- What the Hell, Hero?: He's mad at Christian for driving their mother to abandon them and their father when they were kids, as well as for going to their mother's funeral, and inadvertently causing the fight that resulted their father's death.Braxton: Why would you and Pop go to that funeral?! She left us, do you not remember that?! It's your fault that Pop's dead!! You hear me?! It's your fault!!!
Ray King
Raymond "Ray" King
Played by: J. K. Simmons
The director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).
- Actor Allusion: Ray King and Simmons are both men who had a surprising late-blooming success in their careers.
- I Coulda Been a Contender!: He laments how badly he screwed up with Francis Silverberg, resulting in the latter's death and blowing an incredibly lucky career break. Thankfully he winds up getting another shot courtesy of Christian.
- I Have a Family: When he was cornered at gunpoint by Christian while witnessing the latter's Roaring Rampage of Revenge on the Gambino gang, he talked about his two kids and how he did his best to be a good father to them. This leads to Christian not only sparing Ray but becoming his informant and leading him to become director of FinCEN.
- Jaded Washout: Prior to making contact with Christian he described his career as completely unremarkable and unimpressive, botched further by his own mishandling of Francis Silverberg's case. Subverted after Christian starts informing on his clients to him, turbocharging his career.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Blackmailing Medina portrays him in a very unsympathetic way and emphasizes his apparent corruption (initially) he is absolutely correct to tell Medina that lying on a federal employment application is a serious crime.
- An Offer You Can't Refuse: Ray makes an offer to Medina: either she becomes his Boxed Crook to help him find the Accountant and keeps her job, or her criminal past will be revealed and she will lose her job.
- Passing the Torch: He has only a few months left before he goes into retirement, and wants Medina to take his place as The Commissioner Gordon for the Accountant.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Bar the fact that he essentially blackmails Medina (which proves to be a Secret Test of Character) and uses informations coming from someone who uncooks books for criminal organizations, he's pretty honest and leads his service well.
- Stealth Mentor: He comes down hard on Medina but is really grooming her to take over for him.
Medina
Marybeth Medina
Played by: Cynthia Addai-Robinson
A FinCEN data analyst. Ray King uses her criminal past to blackmail her into tracking down Christian Wolff.
- Big Sister Instinct: Medina has a past of assaulting a man who was hurting her little sister.
- Boxed Crook: Of sorts. She's reformed, but Ray King threatens to publicly reveal her past in order to force her to track down the whereabouts of Mr. Wolff.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: She's addressed as "Agent" by Ray King at the press conference in the ending, suggesting that King used his sway to permanently bury Medina's criminal past as a reward for helping him uncover Wolff's identity.
- Embarrassing Tattoo: Has a large tattoo of a .45 pistol covering her abdomen.
- Inspector Javert: After Ray King orders her to look into the Accountant as a Secret Test of Character, she goes looking into the financial records of ZZZZ Accounting (Wolff's firm) and the businesses he set to launder the payments he receives from his criminal employers without a warrant, and when King informs her about how the Accountant is an unofficial informer for FinCEN (by calling him), she insists that he needs to be arrested anyway because he is not an official informer. King has to convince her that Wolff is definitely better off left where he is.
- Reformed Criminal: She managed to hide her criminal past when she was recruited by FinCEN... but Ray King wasn't fooled.
Francis Silverberg
Francis Silverberg
Played by: Jeffrey Tambor
An accountant who worked for the Gambino crime family and turned FBI informant who befriend Christian Wolff in prison and taught him a lot about criminal accounting. Ray King was Silverberg's handler, but his inaction led to Silverberg's death.
- Ambiguously Jewish: "Silverberg" sounds Ashkenazim.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: The Gambino gang captures him right upon his release from prison and tortures him to death for betraying them.
- Mentor Archetype: His teachings about accounting in the criminal underworld proved very valuable to Wolff.
- Only Friend: He is the only person who's shown to have gained complete trust of Wolff. His death at the hands of the Gambino family made Wolff go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against them.
Justine
Justine
click here for SPOILERS
Played by: Alison Wright, Izzy Fenech (as a young child)
The mysterious woman who finds missions for Christian Wolff. She's only heard on the phone... for most of the film, that is.
- Deadpan Snarker: Justine has a very lively sensibility, despite suffering from lifelong mutism from childhood into adulthood.Justine: (when Christian calls) Hello Dreamboat.
- Disability Superpower: As part of being Christian's mission control she is able to surf the internet to find buyers for rare paintings, create fake identities, and retrieve files for the next mission or assignment. She's actually a low functioning autistic, and does all this with a high-end computer workstation from her bedroom in the autism residential home her therapist father runs with large donations from Christian.
- The Dog Was the Mastermind: Did you think she's some kind of big corporation head or syndicate leader who secretly employs Christian ? Nope. It turns out she is Christian's autistic childhood friend. Nobody will ever suspect a woman who's been under special care for autism all her life of being the Accountant's provider of assignments.
- Mission Control: To Christian.
- True Companions: With Christian all these years.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: She gives Christian what's supposed to be an honest, simple job, and instead gets him into a shootout.
- Voice with an Internet Connection: A literal version as she's The Voice for most of the movie since she's nonverbal. As per usual for this trope she's a master hacker who alters records and monitors the internet for chatter related to "The Accountant" to forewarn him off any hostile interest.
