Some actors are comfortable playing evil characters. Others aren't. And some get too comfortable.

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Hollywood has always had a flair for creating compelling villains, so it's only natural that the actors conveying them would covet—or disdain—the experience of being bad. Some actors lose sleep over playing the baddie, carrying their character's guilt, while others enjoy getting into character perhaps a little too much and revel in their ability to frighten.

For Ricky S. Sekhon, the actor cast as one of the world's most hated real-life villains in Zero Dark Thirty—andwho wrote about his experience in a recent Times Op-Ed piece—the eight weeks before he took up his role as Osama bin Laden were spent having heart palpitations. Sekhon's pithy Times piece inspired me to look at other actors' reflections on playing some of cinema's most notoriously evil characters. Here's what I found.

This post also appears on Flavorpill, an Atlantic partner site.