HBO Max's The Tourist Characters Ranked

Given its premise, the appeal of "The Tourist" is ironic. HBO Max's latest bingeable thriller, created and written by the Williams brothers ("Angela Black," "Liar"), focuses on Elliot (Jamie Dorman), a man with no memory who is pursued by hitmen and ne'er do wells. That plot alone made the show worth anticipating. However, the limited series' secret weapons are how well-drawn its titular amnesiac is and how charming its criminals are. Sure, there's nothing new about a show populated by appealing rogues, much less an Australian one ("Animal Kingdom," a TNT show about attractive and alluring rogues, is adapted from an Aussie feature film), but the unabashed confidence with which "The Tourist" deploys its ensemble suggests it has some aces up its sleeve.

Boy, does it ever. By the time "The Tourist" shows its hand, it's suckered you so deep into its narrative there's no guarding against the gut punches it starts throwing with precision. That makes its cast of characters a triumphant Trojan Horse for lofty themes, shocking beats, and some of the most memorable television of the year.

Here is our ranking of the characters of "The Tourist."

Marco (Damien Strouthos) is the unluckiest character on a show with characters who keep catching awful breaks. The low-level thief is a small cog in Kosta's (Alex Dimitriades) drug operation, but he's also someone Elliot trusts. His predicament is the first sign that something is wrong in Burnt Ridge. When we first see his haunted visage, it's buried under layers of the harsh Australian outback. Marco is six-feet under but still alive and demanding Elliot's help. 

Since he seems like a relatively solid guy, the jeopardy Marco's in is alarming. Concurrently, his death due to a scorpion sting is a tragedy for both Elliot and the show's audience. What makes Marco interesting in the long run, though, is how he's something of a false sympathy flag. Initially, Marco is proof that the memory-wiped Elliot has good intentions, and he takes pains to do the right thing. But if Elliot, as we learn, was a deeply awful person, then there's no telling who Marco was either. We only see him through Elliot's eyes or in the haze of Elliot's scattershot memory. In this way, Marco is more interesting as a reiteration of the show's themes than a character, but his presence is vital until the second it's gone. 

"The Tourist" is a co-production between the Australian streaming service Stan and the BBC, but it translates well for an American audience. 

Think about it. Both noir and Westerns are American inventions. Hollywood brought both genres to the world, inspiring filmmakers as disparate as Kurosawa, Jean Pierre-Melville, and Sergio Leone to make essential contributions to cinema. It's not strange for American audiences to watch a regional spin on these styles. That said, American audiences might not know that two of the funniest characters in "The Tourist" are played by a comedy duo that's beloved in Australia. 

That would be The Umbilical Brothers, David Collins and Shane Dundas, who play Arlo and Jesse Dobson, respectively. 

The show molds itself to the team's brand of comedy when they appear. Getting broader and weirder the second both show up, the show doubles down on their patented weird streak when Arlo appears in Elliot's LSD trip as a completely different character. It's details like this that make "The Tourist" a singular strain of noir Western that's both defiantly Australian and gloriously bizarre.

"When people show you who they are, believe them."

Maya Angelou advised this, and she also wrote a poem about the struggle for freedom and the strength it takes to find your voice in the midst of fighting for one. That's worth mentioning because in "The Tourist," Ethan Krum (Greg Larsen) quickly shows Helen Chambers (Danielle Macdonald) and the audience who he is. He will silence Helen's voice to better hear his own.

When Helen takes an interest in Elliot's crash and the mysterious circumstances surrounding it, Ethan dismisses her drive as a delusion of grandeur. He does this before going out with the boys to celebrate a promotion to the grocery's fish section — Talk about delusions of grandeur! He drags her to weight loss seminars. He demands she shows up on time for things he desires and threatens to end their engagement if she doesn't. Ethan is an emotionally abusive man who puts his partner in a cage through coercive control. That makes him a weak wet blanket of a man who is unable to find any strength in himself that isn't rooted in cruelty to others. We see him plainly, but the fact that Helen doesn't is deeply disquieting.

Kosta has everything but the feeling. 

Which feeling? Any of them. A man who has built a drug empire on the horrifying treatment of his drug mules and his reckless taste for murder, Kosta recognizes he should be anything but numb. And yet he is. The boar hunts, lavish dinners, and microdoses of LSD don't compel him to feel anything, so Kosta chases anything that makes him seem important. When we meet him in "The Tourist," that happens to be his fiancé, who conned him of his fortune and then abandoned him.

The only things that could truly allay the level of loss and brokenness Kosta is mired in are true love or a memory wipe. As fate would have it, Elliot gets the latter. Kosta's brother, Dimitri, tries to offer Kosta the former. Tellingly, Kosta doesn't accept that when it's thrown his way. He chooses the chase instead.

The chase mattered more than anything, and as a result, Kosta dies as he lived — numb. 

Bill Nelson (Ólafur Darri Ólaffson) is more than happy to tell you about his mother.

You shouldn't listen to him. If you do, it's probably too late. The assassin utters "you remind me of my mother" once per episode and that phrase nearly always leads to someone's death. It's part of his ritual. In each tale, he changes his mom's profession and overall temperament, much as the Joker (Heath Ledger) does in his stories about his father in Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight." Yet, Nelson doesn't want to watch the world burn. He's singularly focused on ending Elliot's, and he'll slay or spare whomever he has to accomplish that. 

All this makes Bill sound either cookie-cutter or supervillain-like, but it's a tribute to the brilliant writing of "The Tourist" (and Ólafur Darri Ólaffson's performance) that there are devils in Bill's details. 

For a guy employed by a wealthy drug lord, Bill's car and home are rather threadbare. He chooses a shotgun when a ranged weapon might do. As a character, Bill is wonderful and terrifying because he's bereft of any purpose other than assassination. He's a man who becomes three-dimensional only when murder is on the table. Bill lives to kill.

Early on in "The Tourist," Luci (Shalome Brune-Franklin) tells Elliot a story about how her dad would discuss coffee beans. 

Her dad saw them as malleable, possessed with the ability to roll wherever the wind blows them. If this metaphor sounds flimsy or silly, that's because Luci is just making it up. And when Elliot asks her why she's fibbing, her response is remarkably transparent: "I liked the story, so I borrowed it. That's what people do, you know, tell little white lies, make a version of themselves." 

That's definitely what Luci does. As it turns out, this beguiling enigma is a con woman who separates people from their money, and that means lying for a living. What's tricky for Elliot, though, is that Luci's affection for him is intrinsically linked to her duplicitousness. It's not clear if Luci loves Elliot, but their chemistry is meaningful. That means Luci must make a series of Hail Mary plays to save a man she can't be honest with. That also makes Luci's final moments heart-shattering as dies of a bullet wound sustained while trying to help Elliot. 

At that moment, Luci finally shares a story about who she and her dad were. It's not particularly revelatory, but it's honest. In her last moments, she doesn't defer to the tiny lies that people often tell themselves. That makes her extraordinary.

Late into "The Tourist," Helen Chambers (Danielle McDonald) is told that her love story with Elliot could be "the greatest of all time." 

That sentiment isn't inaccurate. Helen and Elliot have stuck by each other through thick and thin, triumphing over a cadre of villains, memory loss, and a plot to sully their names. On top of all that, Helen has already endured an emotionally abusive relationship. She's been stuck in a precinct that undervalues her keen eye and unwavering optimism. Helen Chambers is a diamond in the rough, and no one except a man who has no other friends in the world has been able to see it. 

There has never been a character on television quite like Helen Chambers. She's a hero who isn't particularly good with weapons. She's a plus-size woman with an ingenue's arc. Helen has agency and spunk and verve. If she got her own show in the wake of "The Tourist," nobody would complain. You can't give a stronger compliment to a secondary character than that. Helen could be the subject of some of the greatest stories ever.