Vic Mackey | The Shield | Richard III | John Belushi

Soon after graduating from BU, Chiklis moved to New York and prepared for greatness. Greatness, however, took its sweet time. Chiklis scrapped and starved like any barely working actor and eventually landed the lead in the critically maligned 1989 John Belushi biopic Wired. Next came the likable small-town title character in the 1991-95 television series The Commish. But afterward, he fell into a rut, stereotyped as the doughboy do-gooder. So he shed the nice-guy image - lost 50 pounds, shaved his head, and ended up scoring the role of a lifetime, Vic Mackey, in Shawn Ryan's renegade FX series about crooked cops, The Shield.

Loosely based on scandals in L.A.'s Rampart division, The Shield brings viewers inside the tense, morally compromised world of cops in the fictional town of Farmington. Mackey is the swaggering tough who runs the department's strike team with all the subtlety of a pickax. He is a classic antihero, a protagonist so compelling that even after he killed one of his own men in the pilot episode, it's still hard to dislike the guy. Over the course of the show's first four seasons, he cheated on his (now ex-) wife, planted evidence on several suspects, stole from the Armenian mob, and strong-armed justice a number of times in the name of, well, not law as much as order. Chiklis compares Vic Mackey to Shakespeare's Richard III, a character he calls "one of the greatest ever written" (he also hopes to make a film version of that play). The witches' brew of ego, pride, and power suits him well: Chiklis has won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his performance on The Shield.