‘SVU’ has no shortage of epic villains, but none have terrified audiences more than Olivia Benson’s greatest enemy.
Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, or SVU for short, has no shortage of bad guys — remember Brooke Shields as Noah’s grandmother or Robin Williams in his Emmy Awad-winning guest starring role in Season 9? In its 24-season run, the series features serial killers, sex traffickers, abusers, cult leaders, child victims, and more. They have featured Andrew McCarthy of Brat Pack fame, holding his maid as a slave and Chad Lowe as an incestuous murderer. Yet among all these scary antagonists, one stands out as being the scariest, most memorable, and most disturbing: William Lewis, played most sharply by Pablo Schreiber of The Wire and Halo fame.
William Lewis is arguably one of the best, yet worst villains in TV history. He is just downright disturbing. As if it isn’t bad enough that he has committed every crime in the penal code, sometimes serially, what makes him worse is how he terrorized the show’s beloved heroine, Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), and the lengths he went through to do it. It takes him from scary to scariest very quickly. Even the suspicion that there could be someone like him roaming the streets is enough to make SVU fans want to stay home.
How William Lewis Terrorizes Olivia Benson
As a veteran SVU detective, Olivia Benson isn’t easily ruffled. Until she makes the acquaintance of William Lewis. Among their cat-and-mouse pas de deux, he burns off his fingerprints, eludes capture, commits multiple crime sprees, is captured and escapes, and sexually assaults her. But it doesn’t even end there. After kidnapping and torturing Olivia, he survives a vicious beating by her as she escapes. In Season 15, Episode 10, he fires his legal representation and represents himself, facing off against Olivia in court. He accuses Olivia of being obsessed with him and of using excessive force, causing her to perjure herself in a court of law. Because, by legal definition, beating a perpetrator with a metal pipe is excessive force; yet audiences know she was defending herself from a monster. He is acquitted of the crimes he committed against others, he is convicted of kidnapping and assault of a police officer, and sentenced to 25 to life. Yet, he manages to escape prison just months into his sentence.
He also knows precisely what makes Olivia tick so that he can use it to terrorize her. This is apparent in Season 15, Episode 12’s “Beast’s Obsession” where he kidnaps a young girl to lure Olivia into his trap, kidnaps her yet again, and then forces her to play Russian roulette with her until he dies. While Olivia is adored by all, his antagonism toward her through some very dark writing amps up the anxiety for viewers. Even Olivia can’t shake the trauma he causes.
William Lewis’ Story Creates Anxiety
Lewis is a hopeless psychopath who just wouldn’t die. He is one of those psychopaths that were both born and made, and his background story is as heartbreaking as it is disturbing, but he came by his predilections honestly. He starts his crimes early and often. His crimes are brutal and happen in short bursts, without warning or modus operandi. Even the TV-appropriate carnage is mind-boggling. People turn him in. He survives beatings and seizures. He gets arrested. He goes to trial. But the charges don’t stick for long. He escapes prison.
How he was able to play the justice system and win so easily for so long is also unsettling. If Captain Olivia Benson and the gang can’t take him down, what could happen in our communities? He would be in prison, and he would escape. Lives are put in danger everywhere he goes. No one is immune. Even the police, who are supposed to be near-invincible on TV, are reduced to his victims. It is hard to ignore a menace to society and that is what Lewis is. He is an amalgam of all that scares us about society: Criminality and the ability to easily get away with bad behavior; that our justice system is flawed. He is everything a civilized society rejects and fears, conveniently playing out on our screens yet oddly, the series has never replicated a character of such dark depth.
Pablo Schreiber’s Performance as William Lewis Is Spot-On
There is no doubt that Pablo Schreiber as William Lewis made his mark on the show. Schreiber has a knack for playing villains. He also plays George “Pornstache” Mendez, an unscrupulous corrections officer, in Orange Is the New Black. Yet, his take on the demented Lewis is so on-point that it is off-putting. Schreiber’s mechanical, detached facial expressions lend an almost “uncanny valley” layer of creepiness to Lewis’s otherwise unsettling demeanor. Then, at once, the tide will shift and Lewis will show some sense of mock emotion to make people think he is normal. The actor is playing an actor, most perfectly.
Seemingly, his performances even make people forget that the actor is a decent person in real life and a father of two. He and Hargitay also have a good relationship off-screen, where she calls him an amazing acting partner and admits to feeling safe with him. It is a good thing that she spoke out because fans despised not only William Lewis but Schreiber as well. He describes himself as being the “most hated guy on Twitter” after OITNB came out shortly after the dark Lewis episodes on SVU. In an interview with VH1, Schreiber says of playing the character:
Definitely SVU is the biggest most passionate fanbase as far as I’ve experienced on Twitter. …SVU is just nuts. I think it was because I played the bad guy on this year’s episode that I kinda was the target. The SVU fandom really gets into living their reality as if it’s true. They take Olivia Benson to be kind of the queen and anything you do to threaten their power structure is very, very bad, and I suffered the consequences for threatening their dear Olivia. I really admire the passion they have for their show because it’s nice to know people really care about TV shows these days.
You can’t blame them, though. He just played the part so well. Even years after his episodes originally aired, audiences can’t shake how disturbed they feel as they watch him. Many still feel relief that he is gone. His reign of terror, even if fictional, lives on as anxiety in the pits of our stomachs, if and when we leave our homes.
