Throughout the 80’s no one played a sadistic bad guy as well as Michael Ironside. He brought a frightening intensity to his roles that sometimes seemed out of place in the otherwise light-hearted cheeseball action movies he appeared in like Total Recall and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone.

Ironside got his start in TV and film roles in his native Canada in the late 1970’s but it was his appearance in David Cronenberg’s Scanners that brought him fame and perhaps typecast him forever. Ironside played Darryl Revok, a man with enough pyschic power that he could literally make your head explode. And when I say literally, I mean it. Just take a look:

Ironside’s next high profile role was as bad-ass resistance figher Ham Tyler on the original V mini-series. From there it was on to roles in various TV series and B movies, with an occassional supporting role in an A movie like Starship Troopers or Total Recall, where he slugged it out with Arnold and then apparently went to a party:

He also out-awesomed the Most Interesting Man In The World in the land of beer commercials when he went all Highlander to shill for Labatt’s Maximum Ice:

I’m happy to say that Michael Ironside is still working and still going strong with recent appearances on TV shows like Castle and Burn Notice and he’s found success as a voice actor: he’s the voice of Sam Fisher in the popular Splinter Cell videogame series as well as Darkseid on the Justice League animated series.