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| “ | Wherever you go, I'll be standing right behind you. | „ |
| ~ Adrian vowing to stay by Cecilia forever. |
Adrian Griffin is the titular main antagonist of the 2020 science fiction horror film The Invisible Man, based on the novel written by the late H. G. Wells. He is one of the many incarnations of the eponymous Griffin, and one of the vilest.
He was portrayed by Oliver Jackson-Cohen.
Biography
One night, Cecilia escaped from him with the help of her sister Emily and their friend James, who was also a police detective. Before they manage to escape, Adrian angrily attacks a window of the car in his attempt to get Cassie back. Two weeks later, Adrian is pronounced dead from committing suicide, yet oddly enough, he left a huge portion of his estate to her.
It is revealed that Adrian was actually faking his death and created a uniform comprised of several small cameras that grant him the ability to turn invisible. With the suit, he psychologically tortures Cecilia to make her seem insane. He steals her work causing her interview to end badly and also heavily drugged her into collapsing. Adrian then pretends to be her and sends an inflammatory message to Emily causing a schism between them. When Sydney, James's daughter, tried to comfort the depressed Cecilia, Adrian slaps her thus leading Sydney and James to believe that Cecilia did it.
She returns to Adrian's home to investigate and discovers one of the invisibility suits. She invites her sister to dinner to discuss the discovery only for Adrian to take a knife and slit Emily's throat with it before placing it in Cecilia's hand. She is implicated in the murder and is sentenced to a mental institution.
Adrian's brother Tom pays her a visit revealing that her suspicions about Adrian being alive and that he was working with him to force her to return to him. It is also disclosed that Adrian had impregnated Cecilia when he inevitably realized that she was using birth control to prevent any pregnancies.
Upon learning this, Cecilia tries to fake a suicide in her room by slitting her wrist with the edge of pen, knowing Adrian would stop her. Once he grabs her hand, she stabs him with the pen, damaging his suit and causing it to glitch. He ends up assaulting and killing some guards who try to get in his way and Cecilia is able to escape the hospital - but not before Adrian tells her he plans to murder Sydney - spurring her to warn James about it. Once she goes over the James' house and shoots to death what appears to be Adrian, but it turns out that Tom was donning the invisibility suit at the time being set up as the fall guy for Adrian - who fakes having been kidnapped by his brother and held hostage at his own house.
Cecilia returns to Adrian's home where he shows her to the table full of food. Cecilia attempts to convince Adrian into admitting his misdeeds under the threat of their baby not being apart of his life to no avail. She then asks Adrian to grant her permission to tidy herself up and then wears the invisibility suit. Returning to the dinner table, Cecilia grabs a knife and slits Adrian's throat in a fashion similar to when he killed her sister. Furthermore, in an extra taste of irony, she also makes it look like a suicide. In his last moments, Adrian sees Cecilia reveal her ruse to Adrian, and taunting him with the same single word he used to taunt her at one point, "Surprise". A stunned Adrian then dies, realizing that Cecilia has beat him and he has now lost everything - his control over Cecilia, his millions, his child, and now his own life.
Personality
| “ | We’ve seen the villain so many times, so I think as an actor, you always want to try and think of the most interesting way. To me, it was a sort of a no-brainer when I read [the script] that I wanted to — these people who are narcissists and are so controlling in relationships, they are incredibly intelligent — make Adrian so good at performing, and pretending to be so charismatic and to fool people into a false sense of security. That’s the direction we’ve gone with him, which I personally think is the right way to do it. It’s been really good fun because we kind of want to mess with an audience as well, and mess with them going, ‘Wait, but he’s not… he didn’t seem to be a bad guy. He seemed nice.’ But then he does these horrific things. | „ |
| ~ Oliver Jackson-Cohen about Griffin. |
Little to nothing is known about Griffin's early life or backstory however the film makes clear that Adrian was a very wealthy but abusive scientist and businessman who was the ex-boyfriend of Cecilia Kass. He's a classical example of a realistic textbook abuser and was great at gaslighting his victim. Throughout the movie, he managed to turn many people against Cecilia despite some being aware of how he treated her before his supposed death. This makes him a highly realistic representation of how abusers treat their victims in reality. He was physically and emotionally abusive towards her, even going so far as to hit her if he suspected her of thinking something he didn't like. His desire for a child may very well have been a manifestation of his own lust and obsession for control over her life considering she knew she could never leave him had she given birth to one. He was obsessed with Cecilia also considering her to be a thing to have under his thumb rather than a person to love. A true control freak, Adrian wanted to have absolute control on her, by dictating her how she must dress, talk, eat or think. This cruelty also extended to Cecelia's pet dog-as it was revealed at the beginning of the film that he kept a shock collar on the animal.
Adrian has blatant signs of narcissism, psychopathy and even obsession. Like a narcissist, he is very self-centered, being incapable of considering needs and well-beings of others except his own as seen with Cecilia and his brother who he involved into his diabolical plan without considering his limits, he also has a great lack of empathy toward everyone and an extremely fragile ego. The fragility of his ego is displayed when Cecilia ran away from him. Rather than accepting his responsibility for this, he lets his ego getting the better of him and psychologically tortures her to have her back. For the psychopathic part, he has no remorse, no will to admit his own faults and a capacity to put himself a superficial charm that eventually leads to his own death.
Abilities and Powers
Powers
Invisibility Suit: Instead of a chemical formula, this iteration of Invisible Man invented a combat suit that can turn its wearer invisible through his work in optics.
- Invisibility: Befitting to its namesake, the suit's main quirk is rendering the wearer imperceptible to the naked eye via. tiny cameras that bending light waves while still allowing the user to see through the mask that come to it. Slight damage on the suit however, can potentially causing this system to glitch, thus giving away the wearer's location.
- Superhuman Strength & Mobility: To get around the fact of the suit lacked armor plating and therefore provided poor defense against attacks, Adrian also designed the suit to increase the strength and speed of its wearer beyond that of average human, making the wearer a one-man-army.
Abilities
- Genius-Level Intellect: Adrian was an incredibly intelligent scientist and capable inventor. A pioneer in the field of Optics, he used his wealth and power to build a beachfront mansion which housed his private laboratory, which he used to create his crowning achievement; his Invisibility Suit.
- Skilled Combatant: Adrian is also a very formidable adversary when it comes to combat because it is not out of the realm of use when his invisibility suit is malfunctioning. This is evident by his massacre at the asylum hallway in which he easily defeated armed guards and even disarmed them at the same time through combination of combat experience and advantages provided by his suit.
Gallery
Trivia
- Unlike the previous invisible men, Adrian used a suit that he would wear to make himself invisible instead of injecting himself with the compound to officially turn invisible.
- The change was well-received by astute watchers who pointed out the downside of being completely invisible with the latter method is that the user would be rendered blind due to light not being able to hit his retinas. The invisibility suit, on the other hand, utilizes tiny cameras that warp the light about the wearer's body while still allowing the user to see, counteracting the aforementioned issue. Either way, this decision received positive feedback from astute viewers and audiences because of it's realistic portrayal of the downsides of becoming invisible.
- According to an interview with the director, Leigh Whannel, Adrian's brother Tom only wore the invisibility suit once when he was attacking Sydney and got killed — meaning all other attacks done on Cecilia were by Adrian himself.
Template:Universal Studios Villains