Ramsay Snow

A bastard son fighting for legitimacy in the North, Ramsay first appears as a hunter with hounds and a taste for cruelty, flaying men who cross him. He serves his father Roose Bolton with unsettling eagerness, charming and affable one moment, savage the next, always hungry for recognition and power.

Iwan Rheon plays him with a cheerful, boyish lightness that makes the violence worse, not better — he never signals menace, he just smiles. The writing gives him no grand ideology, only appetite, which makes him one of the show's purest studies in cruelty without conscience, and genuinely frightening because he enjoys himself.