President Abraham Lincoln (played Benjamin Walker)
Sure, Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for portraying Honest Abe in last year’s Lincoln, but was his a bigger challenge than that of Walker, whose Lincoln, on top of everything else, also had to drive an ax into the heads of undead bloodsuckers? Playing the entire adult life of the Rail Splitter, Walker is surprisingly agile and graceful, both at wielding that ax like a ninja and at making his lifelong quest to stake vampires seem an organic outgrowth of Lincoln’s commitment to social justice. (Turns out slavery wasn’t the only parasitic institution over which the Civil War was fought.)
As is so often the case, Lincoln also has a personal vendetta against the vamps; their bloodsucking was the real reason behind the illnesses and deaths of his mother and son, not the diseases they’d supposedly contracted. Walker comes by his presidential machismo honestly; on Broadway, he was the star of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZp7eBStN1U]