67 Best Fictional Characters That Start With L, Ranked

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

We’ve ranked 67 of them, from the heavy hitters like Luke Skywalker and Loki 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.

L is the letter of legends and loners. It hands you a Jedi, a god of mischief, and the most famous tomb raider in gaming, then keeps going through Hyrule, the Grand Line, and Springfield. It’s also quietly the best letter in the alphabet for anime leads, which is why we’ve gone deep on that below. If you’re playing Scattergories, trying to remember a character name, or just seeing how far the L-list runs, this should cover it.

Start at the top, or jump to what you need using the table of contents. This is one letter of our full A to Z set, so use the navigation below to jump to any other letter.

Our Top 10 Characters That Start With L, Ranked

Luke Skywalker is the character the modern blockbuster was built around. When Star Wars opened in 1977, the whining farm boy staring at two suns on Tatooine became the model for almost every reluctant hero that followed, and George Lucas leaned so openly on Joseph Campbell’s monomyth that film schools now teach the two together. Luke is the call to adventure made flesh: the ordinary kid who turns out to be the son of the galaxy’s greatest villain, and who saves his father not by beating him but by refusing to.

Mark Hamill’s performance grew up with the trilogy, from the eager pilot of A New Hope to the haunted Jedi of Return of the Jedi, throwing away his lightsaber in the Emperor’s throne room in one of cinema’s great acts of defiance. That scene still anchors the whole saga’s moral spine.

The sequel films handed him a harder, more divisive role as the disillusioned hermit of The Last Jedi, a choice fans still argue over, before his brief, franchise-detonating return in The Mandalorian reminded everyone why the green-lightsaber years mattered. Hamill has since become as beloved for his voice work, not least a definitive Joker, as for the role that made him.

He takes the top spot because no other L name has shaped as much of modern pop culture. Every chosen-one story since 1977 is, on some level, doing Luke.

Loki is the rare villain who was allowed to become the hero of his own story, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe is arguably better for him than for anyone bar Tony Stark. Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby adapted the Norse trickster god for Marvel in 1962, but it was Tom Hiddleston’s decade in the role that turned Loki into a phenomenon: the silver-tongued adopted prince of Asgard whose jealousy of Thor curdles into the invasion that assembles the Avengers.

What kept him interesting was that Marvel never fully redeemed or condemned him. He dies, returns, betrays, and sacrifices himself so many times across the films that the instability becomes the character. His two-season Disney+ series pushed him to the centre of the entire multiverse, ending with Loki taking Odin’s throne in the strangest possible sense, holding the timelines together alone.

Hiddleston plays him as wounded vanity wrapped in wit, a god who wants to be loved and settles for being feared. It is a performance that made a generation of viewers root openly for the bad guy.

Second only to Luke, and the highest-ranked Marvel character on this list. He would, of course, argue he should be first.

Lord Voldemort is one of the most recognisable villains in modern fiction, a Dark wizard so feared that most of his world refuses to say his name at all. Born Tom Marvolo Riddle, an orphan who grew up unloved and decided power was a substitute, he split his soul into Horcruxes to cheat death and spent a lifetime hunting the one boy prophesied to end him. J.K. Rowling built him as the shadow Harry might have become, which is what gives the seven-book duel its weight.

Ralph Fiennes made the adult Voldemort a genuinely unsettling screen presence from Goblet of Fire onward: noseless, whispering, and all the more frightening for how quietly he menaces. The character’s whole arc is a warning about the terror of dying and the worse things people do to avoid it.

His shadow reaches well beyond the books. Voldemort has entered everyday language as shorthand for the thing too dangerous to name, which is about the highest cultural watermark a villain can hit.

Highest-ranked villain on this list, and comfortably the most feared name in it.

Lara Croft is the most famous woman in video game history, and for a long stretch of the late 1990s she was simply the most famous face in the medium full stop. Created at Core Design in 1996, the British archaeologist with a pair of pistols and a talent for raiding ancient tombs arrived when games were still overwhelmingly a boys’ club, and became a genuine crossover celebrity: magazine covers, adverts, a mainstream icon before gaming had many.

The character has been rebooted as thoroughly as any on this list. The original polygonal adventurer of the PlayStation era gave way to Crystal Dynamics’ grittier, more human Lara in the acclaimed 2013 reboot, which recast her as a survivor rather than a pin-up and revived the whole franchise. Angelina Jolie made her a box-office action heroine in 2001; Alicia Vikander took a grounded run at the part in 2018.

What has never changed is the core: intelligence, self-reliance, and a refusal to wait for rescue. Lara proved a woman could headline an action franchise across three decades, and every adventuring heroine since owes her something.

The first video game character in our top 10, and the one who kicked the door open for the rest.

Link is the green-clad hero of Hyrule, and the first thing worth clearing up is that he is not called Zelda. That is the princess. The confusion is almost as old as the series itself, and Nintendo has quietly enjoyed it since 1986. Link is the silent, sword-and-shield adventurer players have guided through nearly forty years of one of gaming’s most revered franchises, usually cast as the reincarnated hero chosen to stop Ganon and rescue the kingdom.

His silence is deliberate. Miyamoto’s design leaves Link deliberately blank so the player pours themselves into him, which is why the name is a pun: he is the link between you and the world. Ocarina of Time redefined 3D adventure games in 1998, and Breath of the Wild did it all over again in 2017, handing players an open Hyrule and trusting them to find their own way through it.

Across the timeline he has been a boy, a young man, a wolf, and a sailor, but the green tunic and the Master Sword always tell you who you are looking at. Tears of the Kingdom continued the run in 2023 as one of the best-reviewed games of its year.

Fifth on pure gaming royalty, and the quietest hero in the entire top 10.

Monkey D. Luffy is the beating heart of the best-selling manga of all time, and on global reach alone he belongs in any serious top 10 of the letter. Eiichiro Oda’s straw-hatted pirate has been chasing the legendary One Piece treasure since 1997, and the series he leads has sold more than 500 million copies worldwide, a figure no other comic, East or West, has ever touched.

Luffy ate the Gum-Gum Fruit as a boy, turning his body to rubber, and set sail to become King of the Pirates with a crew he collects one misfit at a time. What makes him work across more than a thousand chapters is his simplicity: he is loyal to the point of recklessness, hungry in every sense, and incapable of walking past an injustice. The emotional gut-punches Oda lands, Going Merry, Marineford, Wano, all hit because Luffy feels everything at full volume.

Netflix’s 2023 live-action adaptation cracked a code that had defeated anime adaptations for years, becoming a genuine mainstream hit and pulling millions of new fans toward the source.

The highest-ranked anime character on the list, and the one carrying the biggest fanbase behind him.

Luigi is gaming’s most famous second banana, and he has built an entire personality out of it. Introduced in 1983’s Mario Bros. as a palette-swapped player two, the taller, thinner, more nervous brother slowly earned a character of his own: jumpier than Mario in both senses, forever a little overshadowed, and all the more endearing for it. Nintendo even declared 2013 the Year of Luigi to mark his thirtieth anniversary, a rare corporate wink at a sidekick.

His signature series, Luigi’s Mansion, flipped the dynamic entirely, sending a terrified Luigi to hoover up ghosts while Mario waited to be rescued, and it remains one of Nintendo’s most charming spin-offs. Whether he is out-jumping his brother in the platformers, tearing up Mario Kart, or cowering through a haunted house, Luigi is the everyman to Mario’s hero.

The 2023 Super Mario Bros. Movie gave him a fresh spotlight for a new generation, and the internet’s long-running affection for him, the Death Stare, the memes, the Weegee of it all, shows a character who is beloved precisely because he is not the star.

Seventh, and proof that you do not need top billing to be iconic.

Lisa Simpson is the moral and intellectual centre of the longest-running scripted primetime series in American television history. Since The Simpsons began in 1989, the middle Simpson child, an eight-year-old vegetarian, saxophone player, environmentalist and second-wave feminist in a family that mostly is not, has been the show’s conscience and, quietly, its most fully drawn character.

Matt Groening built her as the counterweight to Bart, and Yeardley Smith has voiced her for more than thirty-five years. Lisa’s best episodes, Lisa’s Substitute, Lisa the Vegetarian, Lisa’s Sax, tend to be the show’s most emotionally honest, because a gifted kid trapped in a town that neither understands nor rewards her intelligence is a genuinely poignant idea under the gags. Her saxophone solos, her Buddhism, and her endless disappointment in the world’s stupidity all feel like the writers’ own.

She is also a rare thing on children-adjacent television: a girl written to be admired for her brain. Generations of viewers grew up seeing a bit of themselves in the smartest, loneliest person in the room.

Eighth, and the only entry here who could out-argue everyone above her.

Legolas is the elf who made archery cool for a whole generation of cinemagoers. J.R.R. Tolkien created the Prince of the Woodland Realm as one of the nine walkers of the Fellowship in 1954, but it was Orlando Bloom’s turn in Peter Jackson’s trilogy that turned him into a breakout star, all preternatural calm, impossible eyesight, and a running arrow tally with Gimli that gave the war films their lightest running joke.

On the page Legolas is quieter, a symbol of the fading age of elves and a bridge between the Fellowship’s mortal members and a world that is slipping away. On screen he became an action icon, sliding down stairs on a shield and bringing down an Oliphaunt single-handed, sequences that helped define the blockbuster fantasy filmmaking the trilogy pioneered. Jackson liked him enough to bring Bloom back for the Hobbit films, expanding a character Tolkien barely featured there.

He remains one of the most recognisable elves in fiction, the template for the graceful, deadly archer that fantasy games and films have copied ever since.

Ninth, and the surest shot in the top 10.

Lightning McQueen closes the top 10 as the youngest icon on it, and the one with the biggest merchandising empire behind him. Pixar’s hotshot rookie race car, voiced with easy charm by Owen Wilson, headlined 2006’s Cars and its two sequels, and while the Cars films are not the studio’s most acclaimed, they are among its most commercially enormous: the franchise has generated billions in toys, apparel and theme-park presence, a scale that dwarfs several better-reviewed Pixar properties.

The first film’s arc is a proper one, a self-absorbed speedster stranded in the forgotten town of Radiator Springs, learning that the point was never just to win. Cars 3 gave him an unexpectedly graceful late chapter about ageing out of the sport and passing the torch, one of the more mature stories Pixar has told in a franchise aimed squarely at kids.

For a certain generation of children, Ka-chow and that red number 95 were a first favourite character, and Lightning remains a fixture of Disney parks and playrooms worldwide.

Tenth, and the fastest way to end a top 10.

More Iconic Fictional Characters Starting With L

Leia Organa is one of the most important women in blockbuster history, and on a less Star Wars-heavy list she would push straight into the top 10. Carrie Fisher’s princess-turned-senator-turned-general spent the original trilogy running the Rebellion while everyone else caught up, delivering the plans, the sarcasm, and the steel that held the Alliance together. She was written in 1977 as a leader who happened to need rescuing once, then spent the rest of the saga doing the rescuing. Fisher’s later turn as General Organa, and her death in 2016, turned the character into something even more resonant.

Lex Luthor is the archetype of the villain who needs no powers, only a bottomless ego and a grudge against a god. Superman’s nemesis since 1940, Luthor is the self-made Metropolis billionaire who cannot forgive the world for loving an alien more than it loves him, and that jealousy has powered eight decades of stories. Gene Hackman played him as a preening schemer, Michael Rosenbaum humanised him across Smallville, and the character keeps returning to screens because the idea, brilliance turned rotten by pride, never dates. He is the reason Luthor is shorthand for the corporate supervillain.

Luna Lovegood is the Harry Potter character readers protect most fiercely, a dreamy, unflappable Ravenclaw who believes in Nargles, reads magazines upside down, and never once pretends to be anything other than herself. Introduced in Order of the Phoenix, she quietly became the emotional heart of the later books, the friend who understands loss because she has lived it, and whose strangeness is revealed as a kind of courage. Evanna Lynch’s casting was famously plucked from the fanbase, and she played Luna with exactly the gentle oddity readers had imagined. Proof that the kindest character in a story can also be the bravest.

Remus Lupin is the best teacher Harry ever had, and one of J.K. Rowling’s most quietly tragic creations. The shabby, gentle Defence Against the Dark Arts professor of Prisoner of Azkaban hides a lifelong secret, a werewolf condition widely read as an allegory for illness and social stigma, and he carries it with a weary dignity that makes his few moments of happiness land hard. David Thewlis played him across the films as the calm, kind mentor the series badly needed after losing better-known figures. Lupin’s story is ultimately about a man who expected nothing good and was proved wrong just long enough to lose it.

L is the reason a generation of anime fans learned to love a battle of wits over a battle of fists. The reclusive, sugar-addicted detective of Death Note, known only by a single letter, sits hunched in his chair and matches the mass-murdering Light Yagami move for move in one of anime’s most celebrated psychological duels. Everything about him is calculated eccentricity: the crouch, the bare feet, the thumb at his lips. He is a genius who plays the fool to see who flinches. For millions, L is the standout of Death Note, and his fate remains one of the medium’s most talked-about turns.

Light Yagami is the other half of Death Note’s great duel, and one of anime’s definitive antiheroes-turned-monsters. A brilliant, bored high-school student who finds a notebook that kills anyone whose name is written in it, Light sets out to murder his way to a crimeless utopia and slowly convinces himself he is a god. The genius of the series is that it lets you ride along with his logic until you are quietly horrified at how far you followed. Where L represents justice as patience, Light is justice as ego, and the show never lets either fully win the argument. A masterclass in watching a clever person rot.

Levi Ackerman is the most popular character in one of the biggest anime of the last decade, and it is not especially close. The short, blunt, ferociously capable captain of the Survey Corps is billed in-universe as humanity’s strongest soldier, and Attack on Titan spends four seasons proving it, sending him spinning through the air to carve down creatures many times his size. Underneath the cold exterior is a man shaped by loss who keeps choosing to fight anyway, and his obsession with cleanliness and his flashes of dry humour made him a fan favourite the moment he arrived. When people talk about anime’s coolest characters, Levi is near the front of every list.

Lelouch vi Britannia is anime’s great chess-playing revolutionary, an exiled prince who gains the power to command anyone to obey a single order and uses it to topple an empire from behind a mask. Code Geass built its whole reputation on his scheming, a run of double-crosses, gambits and reversals that made just as planned a fandom catchphrase. What keeps him compelling is the cost: Lelouch sacrifices almost everything, including the moral high ground, for a goal he believes is bigger than himself, and the series’ ending is one of the most debated and admired in anime. A villain, a hero, and a tragedy depending on the episode.

Lucifer Morningstar took a supporting player from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comics and turned him into a prime-time leading man. The version most people know, the Devil who abandons Hell to run a piano bar in Los Angeles and moonlight as a police consultant, was carried by Tom Ellis across six seasons of Lucifer, a show cancelled by one network and revived by Netflix on fan demand alone. Charming, vain and allergic to lies, he is a fallen angel working through several millennia of daddy issues. The character’s comics roots run far darker, but the screen Lucifer proved the Prince of Darkness could carry a romantic dramedy.

Lois Lane has been the best reporter in comics since Action Comics #1 in 1938, and the human anchor that keeps Superman grounded. The Daily Planet’s star journalist is fearless to the point of recklessness, forever chasing the story into the collapsing building Superman then has to pull her out of, and the joke that endured for decades is that she could never spot Clark Kent behind a pair of glasses. Margot Kidder, Amy Adams and others have played her as Superman’s equal rather than his prize, which is the correct reading. Lois is proof the most human character in a superhero story can be the one without powers.

Logan is the most popular X-Man ever created, a berserker with adamantium claws, a healing factor, and a century of buried memories. Wolverine debuted in 1974 and became Marvel’s breakout antihero: short, hairy, permanently furious, and far more interesting than a man who mostly stabs things has any right to be. Hugh Jackman played him for seventeen years across nine films, an almost unheard-of run, and capped it with Logan in 2017, a late, elegiac Western that gave the character the send-off comics rarely manage, before Deadpool & Wolverine pulled him back for more. Filed here under L for Logan, though he would tell you the name doesn’t matter.

Luke Cage was the first Black superhero to headline his own ongoing comic series, and that alone earns his place in any honest history of the medium. Created in 1972 during the blaxploitation boom, the unbreakable-skinned Hero for Hire grew well past his origins into a Marvel mainstay, an Avenger, a husband, and eventually the star of a well-received Netflix series that made Mike Colter the face of the character. Cage’s whole appeal is the contrast: enormous physical power paired with a reluctant, community-minded decency. He is the neighbourhood hero, bulletproof in a hoodie, and the genre is broader for him.

Leon S. Kennedy has the worst first day at work in gaming history, and it made him a star. Introduced in Resident Evil 2 as a rookie cop arriving in Raccoon City on the night it falls to a zombie outbreak, Leon became the survival-horror franchise’s most enduring hero, returning in the beloved Resident Evil 4 as a hardened government agent rescuing the president’s daughter. The 2019 and 2023 remakes handed him to a new generation, and Resident Evil 4 in particular is regularly cited among the greatest games ever made. Capable, quippy and permanently exhausted, Leon is the everyman who kept showing up to the apocalypse.

Lestat de Lioncourt is the vampire who made the modern vampire glamorous, decadent and self-pitying all at once. Anne Rice’s creation, introduced in 1976’s Interview with the Vampire, reshaped a whole genre away from Dracula’s gothic menace toward glamour, sensuality and existential angst, paving the way for everything from Buffy to Twilight. Tom Cruise played him in the 1994 film opposite Brad Pitt, and AMC’s acclaimed recent series gave the character a fresh, franker reinvention. Flamboyant, cruel and desperate to be loved, Lestat is the rock-star vampire before rock-star vampires were a cliche.

Lilo Pelekai is the lonely, difficult, wholly lovable Hawaiian girl at the centre of one of Disney’s most beloved originals. The 2002 Lilo & Stitch paired a grieving child, being raised by her older sister after their parents’ death, with a runaway alien experiment, and refused to soften either of them into cuteness. Lilo is a genuinely odd kid, feeding a fish sandwiches and photographing tourists, and the film lets her be strange and sad and kind without a lesson attached. Ohana means family, and family means nobody gets left behind became one of the studio’s most quoted lines. The 2025 live-action remake proved the character’s pull endures.

Lando Calrissian is the galaxy’s most charming rogue, the gambler and administrator of Cloud City who sells out Han Solo and then spends the rest of the saga making up for it. Billy Dee Williams brought a suave, easy swagger to The Empire Strikes Back that made Lando an instant fan favourite despite the betrayal, and he redeemed himself flying the Millennium Falcon into the second Death Star. Donald Glover’s turn in Solo captured the younger version with obvious relish. Lando is the friend you cannot quite trust and cannot help but like, and the cape has never been worn better.

Leslie Knope is television’s great argument that earnestness can be funny. Amy Poehler’s relentlessly hopeful deputy parks director in Parks and Recreation loves her town, her friends and waffles with a sincerity the show mines for seven seasons of warmth and gags. Where most sitcom leads are defined by their flaws, Leslie is defined by how much she cares, and the comedy comes from the sheer force of it colliding with small-town bureaucracy. She became a genuine cultural touchstone, quoted in workplaces and Galentine’s Day cards alike. One of the warmest characters modern comedy has produced, binders and all.

Characters Beginning With L, By Franchise

Disney & Pixar

Marvel

DC

Star Wars

Anime & Manga

Sitcoms & TV

Video Games

Books & Literature

Other notable mentions

Best Characters Beginning With L 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 L has a few of those up its sleeve.

• Luke Skywalker (Star Wars)
• Loki (Marvel)
• Lara Croft (Tomb Raider)
• Link (The Legend of Zelda)
• Luigi (Super Mario)
• Lisa Simpson (The Simpsons)
• Legolas (The Lord of the Rings)
• Lightning McQueen (Cars)

For double-letter bonus points

• Luna Lovegood (Harry Potter)
• Lois Lane (DC)

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

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