83 Best Fictional Characters That Start With C, Ranked (With Images)

You’re here for a list of fictional characters that start with C, so that’s exactly what this is.

We’ve ranked 83 of them, from the heavy hitters like Captain Jack Sparrow and Chewbacca to deeper cuts across film, TV, anime, and games. The top 10 are ordered. The rest are grouped so you can find what you need fast.

C is the letter of captains. America, Jack Sparrow, Hook, Barbossa, Marvel: no other letter hands out this many commissions. It also has the monster who taught generations that C is for cookie, the most famous wookiee in the galaxy, and comics’ greatest lovable loser. If you’re playing Scattergories, trying to remember a character name, or just seeing how deep the C-list goes, this should cover it.

Start at the top, or jump to what you need using the table of contents. This is one letter of a full A to Z: start with the letter A list if you’re collecting the set, or jump back to letter B.

Our Top 10 Characters That Start With C, Ranked

Captain Jack Sparrow is the rare blockbuster character who arrived fully formed and immediately made everything around him look slower. The Curse of the Black Pearl was a film based on a theme park ride, a genre Hollywood had abandoned, and a leading man playing it like a drunk rock star. Disney executives reportedly panicked at the dailies. Then the film made bank, Depp got an Oscar nomination for a popcorn pirate movie, and every studio spent the next decade hunting for its own Jack Sparrow.

The Keith Richards inspiration is well documented (Richards eventually turned up as Jack’s father in the third film), but the character is more than the slur and the swagger. Jack works because you can never quite settle whether he’s a genius pretending to be a fool or a fool with outrageous luck, and the films are at their best when they refuse to answer.

Five films and over $4.5 billion later, the franchise has never once worked without him. Barbossa, who you’ll meet further down, is arguably the better pirate. Jack is the better character.

He takes the top spot because he’s the reason a generation can name a pirate at all. Not bad for a man introduced sailing into port on a sinking boat.

Captain America was punching Hitler on a comic book cover in early 1941, months before the United States entered the war. Joe Simon and Jack Kirby built him as propaganda, and the character’s whole modern history is the process of becoming something better than that.

Steve Rogers should be the dullest Avenger on paper: the boy scout, the man out of time, the one whose superpower is roughly gym, but more so. Chris Evans’s decade in the role proved the opposite. The Winter Soldier turned him into the moral centre of the biggest franchise in film history, and Endgame gave him two of the MCU’s most cheered moments, wielding Mjölnir and finally getting that dance. “No, you move” is the character in three words: the stubbornness is the point.

The shield has since passed to Sam Wilson, who carried it into Brave New World, and the fact that the mantle transfers at all tells you Cap is an idea more than a man, which is exactly what Simon and Kirby intended.

Jack Sparrow edges him for the top spot on pure character invention, but no C name on this list means more to more people. The little guy from Brooklyn did alright.

Chewbacca has been co-piloting the Millennium Falcon since 1977 and has never needed a single line of translated dialogue to become one of cinema’s most beloved characters. That’s the achievement worth sitting with: Peter Mayhew, seven foot three and acting through a full-body suit, built a complete personality out of posture, head tilts, and a sound designer’s blend of bear, walrus, and lion recordings.

Chewie is the franchise’s conscience and its comic relief at once, a 200-year-old warrior who plays holochess like a sore loser and rips arms out of sockets only in theory. He’s loyalty as a character: to Han, most famously, but the prequels and Solo quietly built out a longer life, from the defence of Kashyyyk to the debt that bound him to a smuggler in the first place.

The great Chewbacca injustice, the missing medal at the end of A New Hope, became such a long-running fan grievance that The Rise of Skywalker finally handed him one, forty-two years late. Few franchises bother settling debts that old, which tells you how much this character matters to the people making Star Wars, not just the people watching it.

The tallest entry in our top 10, and the only one who could actually fix the ship he arrived on.

Cinderella saved Walt Disney Animation, and you can put away the princess-marketing scepticism: the studio came out of the war years in serious financial trouble, and the 1950 film’s success is widely credited with keeping it alive to make everything that followed. No Cinderella, and the second half of the twentieth century looks very different for animation.

The character herself has travelled further than any Disney creation bar the mouse. The story existed for centuries before Walt touched it, but the 1950 film’s version, the glass slipper, the midnight deadline, the transformation, became the definitive one, to the point where “Cinderella story” is shorthand across sport, politics, and every reality TV arc ever cut together.

She’s also, quietly, the most present character in the Disney parks empire. The castle at the centre of Magic Kingdom is hers, which makes her silhouette part of the corporate logo half the planet sees before every Disney film. Kenneth Branagh’s 2015 live-action remake with Lily James took over half a billion at the box office and kicked the studio’s entire remake era into gear.

Critics of the character call her passive. The counter is simpler: she’s the single most recognisable fairy tale figure on Earth, and has been for 75 years.

Charlie Brown is the greatest loser in fiction, and one of its most profound creations. Charles Schulz drew him nearly every day for fifty years, close to 18,000 strips, all in service of a boy who never kicks the football, never wins the baseball game, and never speaks to the Little Red-Haired Girl. The joke is always the same and it never stops landing, because the real subject is persistence: he keeps showing up, strip after strip, decade after decade.

Peanuts became the most widely syndicated comic strip in history, but the character’s second life on screen is what fixed him in the culture. A Charlie Brown Christmas has aired every year since 1965, jazz soundtrack and wonky little tree intact, and remains one of the few pieces of mid-century television that children still actually watch. The 2015 Peanuts Movie proved the formula survives modern animation with its dignity intact.

That a round-headed kid in a zigzag shirt whose defining trait is disappointment became a global merchandising empire is one of pop culture’s better ironies, and Schulz knew it.

He was missing from this list entirely until this update, which felt like a very Charlie Brown outcome. Restored to the top five, where he belongs. Good grief.

Catwoman has been keeping Batman honest since Batman #1 in 1940, which makes Selina Kyle one of the longest-running women in comics, and comfortably the most interesting. She’s the character DC has never needed to pick a lane for: thief, antihero, love interest, occasional outright hero, sometimes all four in the same story. The ambiguity is the character, and DC has had the sense to protect it for 85 years.

Her screen history is a relay of era-defining performances. Julie Newmar and Eartha Kitt made her television’s slinkiest villain in the 60s, and then Michelle Pfeiffer’s turn in Batman Returns produced arguably the single most iconic version: stitched vinyl, nine lives, and a performance so unhinged and controlled at once that it’s still the benchmark thirty years on. Anne Hathaway made the part sly and pragmatic for Nolan’s Gotham, and Zoë Kravitz grounded it for The Batman.

We’ll politely step past the 2004 solo film, as the culture has agreed to.

Selina outranks every DC character on this list because she’s the one who never needed rescuing from her own adaptations. Whatever the era does to Gotham, Catwoman lands on her feet. That’s rather the point of her.

Cookie Monster is the only character on this list with a legitimate claim to owning the letter itself. “C is for Cookie”, first performed in 1971, is probably the most successful piece of letter-based propaganda ever recorded, and it means the googly-eyed blue monster has been the letter C’s unofficial mascot for over fifty years. On a list like this one, that’s practically a hereditary title.

Jim Henson created him and Frank Oz performed him for decades, building the character on a beautifully simple engine: total, ungovernable appetite attached to a genuinely sweet nature. The devouring (cookies, plates, occasionally guests’ props) gets the laughs, but the reason parents tolerate ten thousand viewings is that Cookie Monster models something useful: wanting things enormously and being lovely about it anyway.

The character even survived his own moral panic. When Sesame Street introduced the “a cookie is a sometimes food” message in the 2000s, headlines declared him ruined, rebranded as a vegetable eater. He wasn’t, and the show said as much. He remains monstrously, reassuringly himself.

Fifty-five years on air makes him one of the longest continuously performed characters in television history. Om nom nom nom. He earns the top 10 on tenure alone; the charm is a bonus.

Cruella De Vil is Disney villainy with all the magic stripped out, and she’s scarier for it. No curses, no sea-witch contracts, no poisoned apples: just a chain-smoking London fashion heiress who wants to skin puppies for a coat. Dodie Smith wrote her in 1956, the 1961 animated film gave her one of the all-time great character designs (the two-tone hair, the fur, the cigarette holder, the driving), and the theme song did the rest. Not many villains get their name spelled out in their own leitmotif.

She’s also one of the few animated villains to sustain two major live-action incarnations. Glenn Close played her as high-camp menace in 1996 and clearly relished every second. Emma Stone’s 2021 origin film turned her into a punk-era antiheroine, won the Oscar for costume design, and made enough money that a sequel went into development, proof there’s genuine box office in the woman, not just the wardrobe.

The interesting thing about Cruella is that her evil is entirely plausible. Fashion-industry cruelty and moneyed entitlement need no enchanted backstory. That’s why she has dated far less than most of Disney’s mid-century rogues’ gallery.

Highest-ranked villain on this list. She’d expect nothing less.

Chucky is the most durable slasher villain of his era, which is a strange thing to say about a two-foot doll in dungarees. Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers have all been rebooted, recast, and passed between studios. Chucky, the Good Guys doll possessed by the soul of serial killer Charles Lee Ray, has been written by creator Don Mancini and voiced by Brad Dourif continuously since 1988. Thirty-five-plus years of a single creative voice is unheard of in horror, and it shows in how coherent the character has stayed.

It also shows in how weird the franchise was allowed to get. Bride of Chucky swerved into knowing comedy, Seed of Chucky went full meta, and the recent TV series ran three seasons of self-aware, surprisingly heartfelt slasher television before ending in 2024. The franchise has survived one hostile reboot (2019’s Mark Hamill-voiced remake, made without Mancini) precisely because everyone could tell the real Chucky from the substitute.

The doll itself does half the work. Toy-sized horror is primal: the thing in the toy box that shouldn’t be moving. Chucky simply says the quiet part with a kitchen knife.

The only top 10 entrant who’d stab his way up the rankings if he could read them.

Cloud Strife is the most famous JRPG protagonist ever made, and for many players in 1997 he was the moment games grew up. The spiky hair and the absurd Buster Sword made him instantly iconic, but Final Fantasy VII’s actual trick was hiding a story about identity, trauma, and fraudulent memory inside its mercenary hero. Cloud’s stoic-legend persona turns out to be borrowed, and finding out who he actually is remains one of gaming’s great narrative rug-pulls.

The character has since done everything a game character can do: fronted the CGI film Advent Children, crossed over into Kingdom Hearts, and joined Super Smash Bros., the modern measure of gaming royalty. The Remake trilogy has now introduced him to a second generation, with Rebirth in 2024 earning some of the series’ best reviews and the finale, Final Fantasy VII Revelation, unveiled this summer.

He’s here ahead of Charizard and a queue of other candidates because Cloud carries his franchise rather than featuring in it. Final Fantasy had six numbered games before him; it’s his face on the tin ever since.

The first video game character on this list, and on current form the Remake project will keep him relevant deep into a fourth decade. Not bad for a man who lies on his CV.

More Iconic Fictional Characters Starting With C

C-3PO is the fussiest, most anxious character in Star Wars, and one of only a handful of characters to appear in all nine Skywalker saga films, with Anthony Daniels inside the gold suit every single time. That continuity is quietly remarkable: one actor, one role, across 42 years of a franchise that recast or retired nearly everyone else. Threepio works as the saga’s put-upon butler, forever announcing the odds of survival to people who don’t want them, and his double act with R2-D2 is the oldest running joke in the galaxy. George Lucas built him from the bickering peasants of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, which is why two droids carry the opening act of the entire saga.

Yes, his name is Superman, which files him under S. He stays on this list anyway, because this page has always listed him by the name on his desk at the Daily Planet, and by the most persuasive reading of the character Clark Kent is the real man, with Superman as the job. However you file him, he’s the character the entire superhero genre descends from, arriving in Action Comics #1 in 1938 and effectively inventing the category. Christopher Reeve made you believe a man could fly, Henry Cavill carried the brooding years, and David Corenswet’s 2025 film relaunched an entire studio universe on the character’s optimism. Nearly ninety years on, the big blue boy scout still works.

Chandler Bing is the Friends character people actually quote. Ross got the plots and Joey got the spin-off, but Chandler’s sarcasm-as-load-bearing-wall became the show’s comic signature, and Matthew Perry’s timing, the emphasis landing where no other actor would put it, was the engine. Could that delivery BE any more imitated? The character gave a generation its default defence mechanism and its favourite way to stress a verb. Perry’s death in 2023 turned every rewatch into something more tender, and cemented what was already true: of the six, Chandler is the one whose lines you remember without trying. Miss Chanandler Bong remains the greatest wrong name in sitcom history.

Charizard is the most valuable Pokémon in the real world, never mind the fictional one. The final evolution of Charmander has fronted two of the original games’ box covers, headlined the trading card game since 1996, and turned its first-edition holographic card into a six-figure auction staple, with one graded copy famously selling for well north of $300,000. In-universe he’s Ash’s great problem child, the disobedient powerhouse of the original anime run; out of universe he’s the franchise’s second face after Pikachu, gifted two Mega Evolutions and a Gigantamax form because The Pokémon Company knows exactly where its bread is buttered. Every 90s playground had one kid with a Charizard card and a security detail.

Chihiro is the anchor of the most acclaimed animated film of its century. Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and stood for nearly two decades as Japan’s highest-grossing film ever, and it rests entirely on a sulky ten-year-old who earns her courage one indignity at a time in a bathhouse for spirits. Miyazaki’s stroke of genius was refusing to make her plucky from the start: Chihiro begins the film whining in the back seat of the car and ends it having out-negotiated a witch. Her name being taken, and fought for, gives the film its spine. The gold standard for child protagonists, animated or otherwise.

Barbossa is the Pirates franchise’s secret weapon and, whisper it, the better pirate than the man at the top of this list. Geoffrey Rush played him across all five films as the only actor having as much fun as Depp, taking the character from cursed villain to reluctant ally to something like a tragic hero, and dying twice along the way because the films simply couldn’t manage without him. The apple business, the ghost stories speech, the peg leg funded by a king: Rush treats every scene as an acting exhibition with a monkey on his shoulder. Jack gets the legend. Hector Barbossa gets the arc.

Captain Hook has been fiction’s most elegant coward since J.M. Barrie’s 1904 play: a pirate obsessed with good form, terrified of a crocodile that swallowed a ticking clock along with his hand. That image, doom you can hear coming, is one of the great inventions in children’s literature. By stage tradition the same actor plays Hook and Mr Darling, a doubling that quietly suggests every child’s adventure needs a father figure to escape. On screen he’s been Disney’s foppish 1953 schemer, Dustin Hoffman in prosthetics in Hook, and Jude Law’s wounded, vicious take in 2023. Villains date. Hook, somehow, keeps his form.

Charles Xavier founded the X-Men in 1963 as Marvel’s answer to a question the culture was already asking: what does coexistence cost, and who pays it? The world’s most powerful telepath preaching integration from a wheelchair, opposite his oldest friend Magneto’s harder line, gave superhero comics their most durable political metaphor. On screen he’s had the rare fortune of two definitive actors: Patrick Stewart, whose casting was so perfect it felt pre-ordained, and James McAvoy, who got to play the doubt and vanity underneath the saintliness. Stewart’s final turn in Logan, a great mind failing in a water tower, is among the bravest things the genre has done.

The Cheshire Cat has been unsettling readers since 1865 with the best entrance-and-exit strategy in fiction: appearing grin-first and vanishing grin-last, leaving only the smile hanging in the air. Lewis Carroll’s creation is Wonderland’s one honest resident, the only character who admits the place makes no sense and offers Alice something like useful advice, delivered uselessly. “We’re all mad here” has outgrown the book entirely. Disney’s 1951 version made him pink, purple, and gleefully irritating; Tim Burton’s made him a special effect; but the character belongs to Carroll and John Tenniel’s original illustration, all teeth and moonlight. The most quotable cat in literature, and he knows it.

Coraline is the reason a generation of children treated small doors in old houses with appropriate suspicion. Neil Gaiman’s 2002 novella gave us the Other Mother, button eyes, and a heroine whose boredom nearly costs her everything; Laika’s 2009 stop-motion film turned it into one of the most beautiful and genuinely frightening family films ever made. The character earns her place through stubbornness: Coraline wins on sheer bloody-mindedness rather than any special gift, which is a far more useful lesson. The film has become a perennial, re-released to strong box office years later, and the blue hair and yellow raincoat are now instantly recognisable shorthand for the whole genre of beautiful-creepy.

Carl Fredricksen stars in the most devastating ten minutes Pixar has ever produced. Up’s opening montage, a marriage from meet-cute to hospital ward scored to Michael Giacchino’s Married Life, does more storytelling without dialogue than most films manage in two hours, and it means every grumpy thing Carl does afterwards arrives pre-forgiven. Ed Asner voiced him as a man whose squareness of face and manner conceal a promise he still intends to keep. Tying ten thousand balloons to your house is a ridiculous image; as an act of grief and devotion it’s among the most moving in animation. The best pensioner in cinema, and it isn’t close.

Casper has been fiction’s gentlest paradox since the 1940s: a dead child whose entire purpose is kindness, forever apologising for the fright his existence causes. The Harvey Comics cartoons made him a household name, and the 1995 film gave him a genuine technical landmark, as Casper is regarded as the first feature film with a fully CGI character in a starring role, arriving months before Toy Story changed everything. The film also smuggled surprising melancholy into a kids’ movie: a ghost who can’t remember dying, befriending a girl who can’t stop grieving. Sweet, sad, and quietly historic. Not bad for a ghost whose catchphrase is essentially a polite request not to scream.

Conan invented an entire genre from the pages of Weird Tales in 1932. Robert E. Howard’s sword-and-sorcery hero, a Cimmerian thief-turned-king living by wits and broadsword in the pre-historic Hyborian Age, is the template every fantasy barbarian since has copied or argued with, and the character was selling paperbacks decades before Tolkien reached the mass market. The 1982 film made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star and gave the character a second, louder life: Basil Poledouris’s score and the what is best in life speech belong to the pop culture canon now. Fantasy fashion changes; Conan, pushing a century in print, remains stubbornly, profitably unkillable.

Cersei Lannister is the best villain Game of Thrones ever had, in a show spoiled for candidates, because her weapon was never dragons or armies. It was the total conviction that her children justified anything. Lena Headey spent eight seasons weaponising a wine glass and a raised eyebrow, and delivered two of the show’s defining moments: the walk of shame, endured with frightening composure, and the wildfire detonation of the Sept, scored to a cello and a small smile. George R.R. Martin wrote her as a study in how power curdles when it’s held through others. Headey made her impossible to look away from. The realm never recovered.

Clarice Starling walked into a basement corridor of cells in 1991 and became the template for every fictional profiler since. The Silence of the Lambs swept the Big Five Oscars, picture, director, screenplay, and both lead acting awards, a feat managed by only three films in history, and Jodie Foster’s trainee agent is the reason it works: courteous, underestimated, visibly frightened and proceeding anyway. The film never stops reminding you she’s the smallest person in every room and the only one getting anywhere. Hannibal Lecter got the quotes and the sequels. Clarice got the arc, the Academy Award, and the last word: the lambs, presumably, eventually stopped screaming.

Cartman is animation’s most successful monster: a foul-mouthed, scheming, wildly bigoted eight-year-old who has somehow anchored South Park for nearly three decades. Trey Parker voices him as id incarnate, and the show’s sharpest trick is that Cartman is both the joke and the warning; his schemes escalate from playground cons to Scott Tenorman Must Die, an episode so dark it permanently redefined what the character was capable of. He’s the reason the show can satirise anything: whatever the target, Cartman will reliably embody the worst possible position with total commitment. Loathsome, quotable, and load-bearing. Television has produced few characters this awful who matter this much.

Courage is the best mission statement ever hidden in a character name: a small pink dog who is terrified of everything and does the brave thing anyway, which is of course the actual definition of courage. Cartoon Network’s strangest great show dropped surreal, genuinely unnerving horror into a farmhouse in Nowhere, Kansas, and left a generation with formative memories of King Ramses and “return the slab”. Between the scares, the show is about a rescue dog protecting the old woman who loves him from a world (and a husband) that doesn’t. Scary cartoons are common. Scary cartoons about devotion are not.

The Cybermen have been marching through Doctor Who since 1966, first appearing in The Tenth Planet, the same story that introduced regeneration, which makes them present at the most important moment in the show’s history. The Daleks get the fame, but the Cybermen carry the better horror: they were us, once, and they’d like us to join them. Voluntary upgrade, emotion deleted, humanity as a design flaw to be patched. Sixty years of redesigns have never dulled that idea, and the stomp of a Cyberman column remains one of British television’s great recurring nightmares. Every era of the Doctor eventually faces them. Every era should.

Cindy Lou Who gets a handful of lines in Dr. Seuss’s 1957 book and one devastating question: why is Santa taking the tree? She’s the story’s entire moral apparatus in a nightdress, the innocent whose trust starts cracking the Grinch’s undersized heart. The 1966 animated special kept her tiny; Ron Howard’s 2000 film promoted her to co-lead, with Taylor Momsen giving her a whole arc about Christmas cynicism. Either way, the character does the same quiet job: she’s the reason the Grinch’s redemption feels earned rather than convenient. Small part, giant leverage. Every Christmas story since has borrowed her.

Characters Beginning With C, By Franchise

Disney & Pixar

Marvel

DC

Star Wars

Anime & Manga

Sitcoms & TV

Video Games

Books & Literature

Other notable mentions

Best Characters Beginning With C for Scattergories Players

If you’ve landed here mid-game, here’s the cheat sheet. Scattergories scoring varies by edition, but the standard rule applies: your answer needs to be a character whose name starts with the rolled letter, and other players can challenge if they don’t recognise the answer. Some editions award double points if multiple words in your answer start with the same letter, and C has a few of those up its sleeve.

Defensible answers (universally recognised, unlikely to be challenged)

• Cinderella (Disney)
• Captain America (Marvel)
• Chewbacca (Star Wars)
• Charlie Brown (Peanuts)
• Cookie Monster (Sesame Street)
• Catwoman (DC)
• Cruella De Vil (101 Dalmatians)
• Captain Jack Sparrow (Pirates of the Caribbean)

For double-letter bonus points

• Cheshire Cat (Alice in Wonderland)
• Courage the Cowardly Dog (Cartoon Network)
• Cindy Lou Who (some tables will argue Lou breaks the run; know your opponents)
• C.C. (Code Geass), for the anime fans, if your table is brave

Scattergories is a trademark of Hasbro. This guide is unofficial fan content.

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