Let’s be honest, soapies aren’t exactly the stuff Academy Awards are made of. The storylines are ridiculous, the pacing is excruciating and some soaps stray so far from reality, they end up in some weird sci-fi/reality show limbo. But at the same time, it’s kinda why we love soapies so much.
But if you ever needed to find a solid reason why soapies are worth your time, just look for the demented villains. They’re everything you could ever want a villain to be: deliciously evil, scarily attractive and so over-the-top about it all, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d tuned in to RuPaul’s Next Top Drag Queen show.
So here’s my list of the baddest baddies on soaps:
Cherel De Villiers-Heynes Le Roux (Michelle Botes) on Isidingo
She has as many last names as she does dead husbands. When she has affairs she prefers father-son combos; she isn’t afraid to stage kidnappings, frame friends for murder or medicate someone to the point of dementia; and, when she decides to have someone taken out, she opts for the full family package.
Add a fiery mane of hair, tailored suits to compliment her striking figure, millions in the bank and the ability to somehow get away with murder after murder… and you have the queen bitch.
Says Michelle Botes: “Cherel is a phoenix and refuses to wallow. She lives according to her own rules and has a tenacity for life that I admire, even though she drugged her ex-husband with impotency pills, broke up his marriage – drugging the wife in the process, causing her to lose her mind – and was caught in bed with his 20-year-old son. Currently she is facing murder charges!”
Sheila Carter (Kimberlin Brown 1990-2006, and Michelle Stafford 2007-present) on Days of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless
This woman is so crazy, we’ve taken to avoiding women named Sheila! I mean, this is the crazy woman who kidnapped a pregnant woman, stole her baby, got sent to an asylum, escaped and then returned to poison the same woman. Who she then kidnapped and attempted to blow up (no, really). And that’s not even the craziest part yet. She also had full-on plastic surgery to look like another pregnant woman, in an attempt to kidnap her baby. How messed up is that? Sheila is also adept at escaping, having done so from an asylum, two fires and one abandoned cabin – twice – and she has a gift for coming back from the dead, which she did three times.
Morgan Dewitt (Sarah Buxton) on The Bold and the Beautiful
Oh, Morgan. Oh, sweet, crazy deluded Morgan. Once the sexpot trouble-stirrer on the steamy, but cancelled soapie Sunset Beach (where she played Annie), the redhead packed up her crazy and brought it to the Forresters. Her backstory was that she had fallen pregnant with Ridge’s baby while in her teens, and was then forced by Stephanie, Ridge’s mother, to abort the child.
Years later she returns with a dastardly plot; she “tricks” a happily married Ridge into sleeping with her and falls pregnant. She lies to him that she’s not and plans to have the baby on her own. But when Clark (another designer) finds out her little secret, she tries to kill him by setting a python on him. She eventually loses the baby after a fight with Ridge’s current wife, Taylor, and of course, startsto plot her bitter revenge. Which turns out to be kidnapping Ridge and Taylor’s daughter, faking her death (shark attack) and keeping Taylor captive in her basement! If you thought you’ve seen the last of her, think again. Morgan will soon be back!
Stefano DiMera (Joseph Mascolo) on Days of Our Lives
This guy is like 100 villains all roled into one. And he barely gets his own hands dirty. To date, he’s committed various crimes (murder, kidnap, perjury, arson, theft, fraud, mind control, memory manipulation, baby swapping, you know, the usual stuff) through a number of henchmen. In fact, Stefano has had 27 henchmen and counting. What makes him even more badass is his inabilityto die.
So far he’s “died” 11 times, from a multitude of things like fires, gunshots, explosions, plane crashes, a cave-in, a brain tumour, a heart attack and once he even drowned.
Sami Brady (Alison Sweeney) on Days of Our Lives
Samantha Gene “Sami” Hernandez is one badass nutjob. I mean, how many nées do you need? She’s got: Brady, Reed, Walker, Roberts and DiMera. Not that there’s anything villainous about multiple marriages, but when it comes to Sami, it all adds up.
This is the girl who spent most of her teen years and adult life trying to steal her sister Carrie’s boyfriend, going so far as drugging him to sleep with her, falling pregnant with his child and announcing this at hersister’s wedding.
Before all that, when she was just a tween, she tried to sell her baby sister, Belle, on the black market, and had a brief stint as a teen stripper.
She also went through a cross-dressing phase, when she dressed as a man named Stan and became one of Stefano’s many henchmen.
She’s been accused of a few assaults, kidnappings, druggings and a few murders too, even being sentenced to lethal injection once.
But, just like any real villain, she managed to escape every time. - Sunday Tribune