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Creator / Michael Ironside

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"I like to play bad guys, since good guys are always beaten up several times during the movie. Bad guys are beaten only once, in the end."

It seems I have you to thank for my description. Though your life will be ruined slowly, I grant you my trope page.

Frederick Reginald Ironside (born February 12, 1950), known as Michael Ironside, is a Canadian actor and voice actor, hailing from Toronto. He is the DEFINITIVE iconic voice for Darkseid, the Lord of Apokolips himself. He is many things, tropers, but here... he is God.

Ironside is best known for playing military types, villains and anti-heroes due to his deep voice and his eyebrows setting off the Obviously Evil meter, a type he established in his breakthrough performance as the villainous telepath Darryl Revok in David Cronenberg's 1981 film Scanners; it was his character's Psychic Powers that resulted in the film's most famous moment. He also plays military officers or government agents in at least half of his roles, most notably as Sam Fisher from the Splinter Cell series.

His characters seem to have a strange recurring tendency to lose or damage their limbs, as evidenced here.

Ironside is a self-admitted lover of Science Fiction, Dune in particular.


Tropes in his roles include:

  • An Arm and a Leg: Quite a number of his roles have his character lose or damage their limbs, usually an arm, hand, or fingers, even in voiceover roles. Instances include Rasczak of Starship Troopers (who's already lost an arm before the movie even starts), Richter in Total Recall (1990), Miller in The Machinist, Ultra Magnus in Transformers: Prime, and so forth.
  • The Dragon: He is usually this rather than the Big Bad when he is a villain (which would be 90 percent of his roles).
  • Mean Character, Nice Actor: Although he's usually cast as villains or tough guys, Michael Ironside has a reputation for being a friendly and generally mild-mannered man.
  • Meaningful Name: One of his most iconic roles is Darkseid, the god of Apokolips. His stage name is Michael, which means "Like Unto God."


Live-action roles:

Voice roles:


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