107 Best Fictional Characters That Start With M, Ranked

Mickey Mouse takes the top spot. Behind him sit Mario, Mulan, Maleficent, Marge Simpson, Michael Corleone and a Sith apprentice who survived being cut in half.

Thirty-seven of the 107 characters here are Disney’s, counting the animated films alongside Marvel, Star Wars, the Muppets and the Simpsons. The rest come from the Mushroom Kingdom, the Wizarding World, Westeros, Middle-earth, the DC universe and a deep run of anime.

The top 10 are ranked on cultural impact, meaning how far a character reaches beyond the thing they came from. Everything below that is grouped by franchise.

Start at the top, or jump ahead using the table of contents.

Our Top 10 Characters That Start With M, Ranked

Walt Disney did the squeaking himself. When Steamboat Willie opened in New York in November 1928, the sound was the selling point, a cartoon where the music, the whistle and the mouse all landed on the same beat, and the man who ran the studio provided the voice because nobody else was going to.

A century later Mickey is the company logo, the shape on the front gate of six resorts, and the outline a two-year-old can identify. Most of that happened without him doing much on screen. His last great performance is still The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Fantasia, from 1940.

The odd turn came on 1 January 2024, when the Steamboat Willie version of the character entered the US public domain. Within weeks he was in low-budget horror films, which is not a fate Walt planned for.

First, and it would take a global act of forgetting to move him.

Mario started life as a carpenter called Jumpman, dodging barrels in a 1981 arcade cabinet. Shigeru Miyamoto gave him the moustache and cap because a face that small needed features that read at a glance. The name came from Mario Segale, who leased Nintendo of America its warehouse in Tukwila, Washington, and Miyamoto confirmed it with a nod in a Nintendo video in 2015, as reported by the Seattle Times. How it happened depends on who tells it: David Sheff’s book Game Over has Segale barging in over late rent, while a former warehouse manager says the staff named the character after a landlord they had never met, as a joke.

Super Mario Bros. followed in 1985 and sold in numbers that rescued a games industry most people had written off after the 1983 crash. Super Mario 64 then worked out how a 3D world should be navigated, and every third-person game since has borrowed the answer.

The 2023 film took over $1.3 billion with Chris Pratt in the role, Super Nintendo World has opened in Japan, California and Florida, and Charles Martinet handed over the voice in 2023 after more than thirty years.

Second, and the only plumber with his own theme park land on two continents.

Eric Stoltz played Marty McFly for around five weeks of filming before Robert Zemeckis decided the comedy was not landing and recast. Michael J. Fox then shot Family Ties by day and Back to the Future at night for months, which is where the exhausted, wired quality of the performance comes from.

The premise should be unwatchable. A seventeen-year-old travels to 1955, displaces his father in his mother’s affections, and spends the film trying to undo it before he stops existing. It works because Fox plays panic better than almost anyone, and because the script treats its own time-travel rules with total seriousness.

The character handed the culture the DeLorean, the hoverboard and 21 October 2015, a date the internet observed like a public holiday.

Third, and the reason a generation asked their parents exactly how they met.

The studio tried to fire Al Pacino three times during filming, by his own count in a 2016 Associated Press interview. Francis Ford Coppola, close to being fired himself, moved the Bronx restaurant scene forward in the schedule, the one where Michael shoots Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey over dinner, and showed the footage to the executives who wanted the casting reversed. Pacino’s account in his 2024 memoir is blunt about it: that scene is why he stayed in the film.

Michael’s arc is the most complete in American cinema. He opens the film in uniform, telling his girlfriend that the family business has nothing to do with him, and closes the second one having ordered his own brother’s death. Between those two points he takes over a business he wanted no part of, kills a police captain over dinner, moves the family to Nevada and marries Kay on a lie.

Part II split his decline against his father’s rise and won Best Picture, which almost never happens to a sequel. The final shot of the first film, a door closing on Kay while men kiss Michael’s hand, is one of the most studied images in film.

Fourth, and the standard that Tony Soprano, Walter White and Logan Roy were written against.

Auli’i Cravalho never auditioned. She was fourteen, singing at a charity competition in Hawaii, when a casting scout spotted her late in a search that had already run through hundreds of tapes.

The film she carries sends the daughter of a Pacific island chief past her father’s reef to return a stolen heart, with Lin-Manuel Miranda songs and no romance anywhere in it. A Disney lead with no love interest was still unusual in 2016.

Then came the second life. Moana was among the most streamed films of the pandemic years, Moana 2 cleared a billion dollars in 2024, and a version with real actors arrives in 2026 with Dwayne Johnson back as Maui.

Fifth, and the newest character in this top 10 by more than fifteen years.

Maul speaks three lines in The Phantom Menace and dies at the end of it. He is still one of the most popular characters Star Wars has produced, which says something about how much work a design and a fight can do on their own. Ray Park’s martial arts background made the Duel of the Fates the part of that film nobody argues about.

The Clone Wars brought him back with cybernetic legs and a mind wrecked by years in hiding, then gave him what the film never did: a crime empire, a brother, and a long grudge against the Jedi who ruined him. Sam Witwer voiced all of it.

His last fight, three moves against an old Obi-Wan on Tatooine, lasts seconds and settles twenty years of story.

Sixth, and he appears again on our characters beginning with D list, under Darth Maul.

Mulan is the only character in this top 10 who was already more than a thousand years old when Disney got to her. The Ballad of Mulan, a Chinese folk poem about a daughter who takes her father’s place in the army, has been retold in opera, film and print for centuries.

The 1998 version swings between slapstick and mass graves in the snow, and Ming-Na Wen holds both. “Reflection” and “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” have outlived the film on social media, which is a rare afterlife for songs from a Disney picture that underperformed against Hercules and Tarzan at the time.

The 2020 remake turned into one of Disney’s hardest releases. It skipped cinemas for a $29.99 tier on Disney+ during the pandemic, and drew sustained criticism over filming locations in Xinjiang and the lead actress’s public comments on the Hong Kong protests.

Seventh, and the only princess here with a body count.

Julie Kavner was already working on The Tracey Ullman Show when Matt Groening’s crudely drawn family turned up as filler between sketches in 1987. She has voiced Marge in every episode since, nearly forty years, and nobody has managed a passable imitation of the rasp.

Homer got the catchphrase and Bart got the T-shirts, and Marge is the one the show cannot function without. The episodes that hand her the story, the painting, the gambling, the pretzel franchise, are among the best the series has made, because a character built to absorb everyone else’s chaos is at her most interesting when she stops.

She has now been on television longer than most viewers have been alive, on the longest-running scripted primetime series in American history.

Eighth, and the blue hair is recognisable at any size, in any country.

The mask is a William Shatner Star Trek mask, bought cheaply by the production, widened at the eyes and sprayed white. The credits call the character The Shape rather than Michael Myers, and that is the whole design: no dialogue, no stated motive, no face.

John Carpenter made the film for somewhere around $300,000 in 1978 and it became one of the most profitable independent releases ever, which is why every studio spent the next decade funding men in masks stalking teenagers. Everything from Friday the 13th onwards is working from this.

The 2018 sequel deleted every film after the original and took more than $250 million worldwide, a second life that horror franchises this old rarely get.

Ninth, and a boiler suit and a kitchen knife still work as a costume.

Marc Davis drew her as two black horns, green skin and a cape with the proportions of a cathedral, and Eleanor Audley played her with the clipped politeness of a woman who has never been refused anything. Sixty-odd years of Disney villains have been chasing that combination since.

Her motive helps. She curses an infant to death over a missing party invitation, with no backstory offered and none needed, which puts her a long way from the wounded antagonists Disney writes now.

Sleeping Beauty lost money in 1959 and nearly ended the studio’s fairy tale era. Angelina Jolie’s 2014 retelling from Maleficent’s side took over $750 million and started Disney’s run of villain-led live-action films.

Tenth, and the only character here who turns into a dragon.

More Iconic Fictional Characters Starting With M

Samuel L. Jackson asked George Lucas for a part, then asked for a purple lightsaber so he could find himself in the crowd scenes, and Lucas gave him both. Mace Windu is the second-ranked Jedi in the prequels and the only one who gets close to killing Palpatine, disarmed in the Chancellor’s office and thrown out of a window by the apprentice he was warning everyone about. The purple blade became one of Star Wars’ most requested pieces of merchandise, and the character’s death is the hinge the whole prequel trilogy turns on.

A demigod with a living tattoo and a fish hook, voiced by Dwayne Johnson at the point where his singing career started. Maui is the comic engine of Moana and its most interesting piece of writing, a boastful figure whose bravado covers being abandoned as a baby. The shapeshifting animation gave Disney one of its most technically ambitious characters, and “You’re Welcome” has outlasted most of the film’s other songs.

James Earl Jones voiced him twice, thirty years apart, and the stampede in the 1994 film is still the scene that teaches a generation of children what death is. Mufasa is on screen for under half of The Lion King and shapes all of it, first as the father, then as the ghost in the clouds. Disney’s 2024 prequel gave him an origin story nobody had asked for, and it took over $700 million anyway.

A Holocaust survivor who decides that the only lesson worth taking from the camps is that his people should never be defenceless again. Magneto is the most morally coherent villain in superhero comics, and Ian McKellen and Michael Fassbender have both played him as a man whose logic is hard to dismantle. His argument with Charles Xavier has run for sixty years, which is longer than most real political movements last.

The Spider-Man who replaced Peter Parker in the Ultimate comics in 2011 and outgrew the substitution entirely. Into the Spider-Verse won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2019 and rewrote what animation could look like, and Across the Spider-Verse took over $690 million four years later. Insomniac’s games gave him a second lead role. For a lot of readers under twenty, Miles is not the other Spider-Man, he is the Spider-Man.

The face that sold the Xbox, and one nobody has seen. John-117 is a soldier in green armour with a handful of lines per game, built so the player can occupy him, and Halo: Combat Evolved made Microsoft’s console viable in 2001. The relationship with Cortana carries the emotional weight the silent lead cannot. The 2022 television adaptation took the helmet off in its first episode, and the reaction from players told Microsoft exactly how much the anonymity mattered.

The most capable soldier in a series about how little that counts for. Mikasa’s devotion to Eren Yeager reads as simple for most of Attack on Titan and turns into the hardest decision in the ending, which split the fandom in 2023 and is still being argued over. Yuki Kaji and Yui Ishikawa’s performances carried a show that became one of the biggest anime properties of its decade.

The calmest villain in modern anime, and the reason Chainsaw Man landed as hard as it did in 2022. Makima presents as Denji’s handler and turns out to be running something closer to ownership, offering affection as a leash. Tatsuki Fujimoto wrote her as an argument about control dressed up as a workplace romance, and the anime’s restrained voice work made her more unsettling rather than less.

Rowan Atkinson’s near-silent creation is one of Britain’s most successful cultural exports, precisely because there is almost nothing to translate. Fifteen episodes aired between 1990 and 1995, and they have played continuously somewhere in the world since. Two films took a combined $500 million-plus. Atkinson trained the character out of physical comedy traditions that predate television, and children who have never heard of Blackadder still recognise the face.

The regional manager who wants to be liked more than he wants to be competent, and the performance that turned Steve Carell into a film star. The American Office found its footing once it let Michael be good at the job in one specific way, selling paper, while failing at everything around it. His exit in season seven is the last episode most people rate, and the character has had a second life on TikTok that has outlived the show’s original audience.

Pat Morita was a comic actor before this, and was nearly turned down for being too funny. His Miyagi is the reason a teen martial arts film from 1984 still has a franchise: a Second World War veteran whose family died in an internment camp while he served, played with restraint that the script did not require. Morita took the film’s only acting Oscar nomination. Wax on, wax off entered the language, and Cobra Kai spent six seasons in his shadow.

Pete Mitchell is Tom Cruise’s defining role, and the sequel is the better film. Top Gun made fighter pilots a recruitment surge in 1986, and Top Gun: Maverick took over $1.4 billion in 2022 by putting sixty-year-old Cruise back in a cockpit with real G-forces and almost no computer-generated aircraft. The character works as a study of someone who never took the promotion, and a film full of people young enough to be his children.

Two actors, four films, forty-five years, and a world that has been copied by every post-apocalyptic film since. Mel Gibson’s version launched Australian genre cinema in 1979 on a budget of around $400,000. Tom Hardy’s Fury Road in 2015 won six Oscars and is regularly called the best action film of the century, in a story where Max functions as a passenger in Furiosa’s escape.

Meryl Streep plays the editor of a fashion magazine at a whisper, and the cerulean speech is the most quoted piece of writing about the fashion industry in modern film. The character was widely read as Anna Wintour, which Streep has deflected. The 2006 film has had a strange afterlife as a defence of Miranda rather than an attack on her, with a generation of viewers deciding the villain was the one with standards. A sequel arrives in 2026.

Maggie Smith’s Transfiguration professor is the adult the Harry Potter books trust. Stern in every scene until the castle is under attack, at which point she brings the suits of armour to life and says she has always wanted to use that spell. The character carries the series’ quiet argument about institutions being only as good as the people inside them, and Smith played her through cancer treatment during the later films.

Din Djarin revived Star Wars on television in 2019 by keeping his helmet on and letting Pedro Pascal act through posture and a voice filter. The series pulled the franchise away from the Skywalkers and towards a western, and turned a puppet into the most profitable merchandise line Disney had that decade. “This is the way” entered the language within a month of the show airing.

Julie Andrews won Best Actress for her first film role, and P. L. Travers hated what Disney did to her books enough that the argument became a film of its own in 2013. Mary Poppins is the rare screen nanny with no warmth on the surface, all brisk competence and mild vanity, which is what stops the sugar from overwhelming everything. Emily Blunt’s 2018 sequel worked better than most fifty-four-year gaps do.

Two centuries of romantic leads are working from this template: cold, proud, misjudged, and worth the wait. Jane Austen published him in 1813, and Colin Firth’s 1995 BBC performance turned him into a cultural event, with the lake scene becoming one of the most discussed moments in British television. Matthew Macfadyen’s 2005 version gave the character a shyness that has aged well, and Netflix has another adaptation on the way.

Characters Beginning With M, By Franchise

Disney and Pixar

Star Wars

Harry Potter

Marvel and DC

Anime and manga

Sitcoms and TV

Animation beyond Disney

Video games

Film, single-work icons

Books and literature

Best Characters Beginning With M for Scattergories Players

The rule is the same in most editions: an answer has to be a character whose name starts with the rolled letter, and anyone at the table can challenge an answer they do not recognise. M is one of the strongest letters on the board, and some editions award bonus points when more than one word in the answer starts with the same letter. This is unofficial fan guidance, not connected to the game’s publisher.

• Mickey Mouse
• Mario
• Mulan
• Moana
• Marge Simpson
• Maleficent
• Mary Poppins
• Matilda

For double-letter bonus points (two words both starting with M)

• Mickey Mouse
• Minnie Mouse
• Mike Wazowski
• Mary Poppins
• Mad-Eye Moody
• Marge Simpson
• Mr Miyagi
• Moaning Myrtle
• Miss Marple
• Martian Manhunter

Frequently Asked Questions

Working through the alphabet? The N page is next, or browse the characters hub for everything by franchise.