The SMARTEST Villains in Grimm
These are the six smartest villains in Grimm, ranked from cunning to absolutely diabolical. Across six seasons and a hundred and twenty-three episodes, Nick Burkhardt faced down every kind of monster the Brothers Grimm ever dreamed up, but the ones who gave him real trouble weren't the ones with the sharpest claws or the nastiest vogue. They were the ones who played chess while everyone else was playing checkers.
Underneath the vessen encounters and fairy tale mythology, there was a web of political intrigue, family betrayal, and long-game manipulation that would make Game of Thrones proud. And at the center of all that scheming? Some of the most brilliantly written villains in modern fantasy television.
Now, out of approximately sixty-four named villains across the entire series, I've narrowed it down to six. These aren't just the most powerful. They're the most intelligent. The ones who used strategy over strength, manipulation over muscle, and who consistently stayed three moves ahead of a Grimm detective who literally had supernatural abilities on his side. Let's get into it.
Starting at number six, we have Prince Kenneth Alun Goderich Bowes-Lyon. Yeah, that's a mouthful. But don't let the fancy name fool you into thinking this guy was all pomp and no substance. Kenneth, played by Nico Evers-Swindell, showed up in the final quarter of season four and immediately made the other Royals look like amateurs.
Here's the thing about Kenneth. He was a member of the House of Kronenberg, but from a different branch of the family than Sean, Eric, and Viktor. And he'd built a very specific reputation: getting results. Not planning results. Not theorizing about results. Getting them. The other Royals had spent seasons dancing around Portland, deploying agents, hiring assassins, playing the long game. Kenneth walked in and started flipping the board.
His real genius was psychological. Take the way he handled Adalind. She was plotting to kill Juliette, which, on the surface, sure, revenge makes sense. But Kenneth saw the bigger picture. He told her, don't be stupid. Juliette might know how to reach Nick's mother. And more importantly, Juliette had just become a Hexenbiest, which meant her relationship with Nick was fracturing. Kenneth recognized that fracture wasn't a problem. It was a weapon.
Kenneth understood something fundamental about human nature that most of the other villains in this show never grasped. People don't betray the ones they love because they're evil. They betray them because they're in pain. And Kenneth knew exactly how to weaponize that pain.
He discovered the double agent in their ranks. He confronted Captain Renard directly. He called out Adalind's bluffs about her baby. The man had zero patience for subtlety because he didn't need it. When you can read people that accurately, subtlety is just wasted time.
Coming in at number five is Zerstörer, the main Villain of the sixth and final season. Now, I know what some of you are thinking. Zerstörer? Smart? The guy who was basically a demonic wrecking ball? But hear me out, because this is where the show did something really interesting with its ultimate villain.
Zerstörer, whose name literally translates to "Destroyer" in German, was an ancient devil-like creature who millennia ago stole a magic staff to bring about Hell on Earth. Defeated by the ancient Grimms, he was imprisoned in what was essentially a hellish mirror dimension where animalistic vessen ruled and humans were, quoting the lore here, walking meat. He ruled over that chaos. And he waited.
He waited until twenty seventeen.
That patience alone puts him on this list. But what really earns his spot is the specificity of his escape plan. He didn't just bash his way out of a dimensional prison. He orchestrated his freedom through a chain of connections that would make a conspiracy theorist's head spin. He specifically sought out Eve and Nick to lure them into the Mirror Dimension, knowing that would create the conditions for Diana to open a mirror portal to try to rescue them. And when Nick was pulled through that portal, Zerstörer hitched a ride.
He knew he needed a Grimm to have access to the portal. So he used his connections to Eve, Eve's connection to Nick, and Diana's protective instincts to engineer the exact scenario he needed. For a creature imprisoned in a hell dimension, he had a remarkably sophisticated understanding of the modern world. He knew about Grimms, he understood modern technology including guns, and he could hear someone speak to him in a foreign language and immediately mimic exactly what they said and how they said it. That's not just power. That's adaptive intelligence on a terrifying scale.
Now at number four, we have Prince Eric Renard, played by the always excellent James Frain. Eric was the Big Bad of season two, and he brought something to the Royals that none of the other family members quite matched: a veneer of civilization stretched thin over absolute ruthlessness.
Eric was calm. Quiet. Cultured. Highly intelligent. And he was wildly feared among everyone who knew about him. Even his own half-brother Sean was afraid of him, and as we'll get to later, Sean Renard is not a man who scares easily.
What made Eric so dangerous was his willingness to use methods he claimed to find distasteful. He'd tell you he disliked murder and torture, and maybe part of him even believed that. But he'd deploy both without hesitation when they served his goals. As the boss of the Verrat, Eric's strategic playbook was extensive and terrifying.
He hired the terrorist Baron Samedi to sow chaos across Portland, placing entire populations under his thrall, all as an elaborate trap to draw Nick out so he could be kidnapped and enslaved.
And here's the detail that really tells you who Eric was. He sacrificed one of his own bodyguards to test what Baron Samedi could do. He watched the man suffer, and he reveled in it. Eric Renard told himself he was a civilized man. He was anything but. And that disconnect between his self-image and his actions made him unpredictable in the worst possible way. You can anticipate a monster. It's much harder to anticipate a monster who thinks he's a gentleman.
At number three, we have Adalind shade, played by Claire Coffee in what might be the most complex villain arc in the entire series. Adalind was a Hexenbiest and a trained lawyer, and honestly, I'm not sure which of those made her more dangerous.
What separates Adalind from the other villains on this list is the sheer creativity of her schemes. This wasn't someone who relied on brute force or political power. She used potions, shapeshifting, biological warfare, and emotional manipulation in combinations that would make a Bond villain take notes.
Consider the operation she ran to strip Nick of his Grimm powers. She prepared a spell that allowed her to morph into a perfect duplicate of Juliette. Then, wearing Juliette's face, she visited Sean Renard and pretended her feelings for him were returning, setting up a false trail. She checked to make sure the real Juliette was out of the house. Then she took another potion, went to Nick's home, and seduced him while disguised as the woman he loved. The result? Nick lost his Grimm abilities. That's not just a scheme. That's a multi-stage covert operation with redundancies built in.
And that wasn't even her most creative play. Earlier in the series, she used a special toxin on her cat, then took the cat to Juliette as a seemingly innocent gesture. The cat scratched Juliette, introducing toxins that caused her to fall into a coma and lose all memory of Nick. Adalind used a house cat as a delivery mechanism for a targeted amnesia weapon. That's diabolical. That's brilliant. That's the kind of thinking that makes you dangerous not because of what you can do, but because no one can predict what you'll do next.
The ironic beauty of Adalind's arc is that all of her foiled schemes eventually led her to build a modest, loving life as a mother and romantic partner to the very Grimm she'd been trying to destroy. The smartest thing Adalind ever did might have been failing at villainy just enough to find something better.
At number two, Conrad Bonaparte. Played by Shaun Toub, Bonaparte was the main villain of season five and the co-founder of Black Claw, the vessen organization hell-bent on revealing the supernatural world and subjugating humanity. And if every other villain on this list was playing chess, Bonaparte was playing chess while simultaneously running the chess tournament and rigging the brackets.
What made Bonaparte so maddening for Nick and his team was simple. Every time they thought they were making progress, they found themselves outmaneuvered and outsmarted. They appeared almost powerless against Black Claw's increasing might, and that was entirely by Bonaparte's design.
His strategic thinking operated on multiple levels at once. He sent loyal agents to die as distractions, understanding that sacrifice was just another tool. He forced Adalind to join their cause by threatening her children, because he understood that even the most powerful Hexenbiest in the world has a pressure point when she's a mother. He destroyed the local Hadrian's Wall base. He painfully cursed Adalind when she was uncooperative. He personally, slowly, agonizingly murdered Meisner, taking obvious pleasure in it.
But here's what really earned Bonaparte the number two spot. He was smart enough to recognize that Nick Burkhardt was more valuable as an asset than as an enemy. Think about that. Every other villain in this show looked at Nick and saw a threat to be eliminated. Bonaparte looked at Nick and saw a recruitment opportunity. He insisted that Black Claw's new world order had a place for a Grimm and tasked Renard with bringing Nick into the fold. That's the kind of strategic thinking that builds empires.
And at number one, the smartest villain in all of Grimm, Captain Sean Renard. Played by Sasha Roiz across all six seasons, Renard wasn't just the smartest villain on this show. He was arguably the most complex character in the entire series.
The son of King Frederick Renard and one of his Hexenbiest mistresses, Elizabeth Lascelles, Sean was both half Royal and half Zauberbiest. From birth, he existed between worlds. As a child, he spent years on the run, fleeing assassination attempts ordered by his father's wife. That kind of childhood doesn't just shape a person. It forges a survivor. And Sean Renard survived by becoming the single greatest manipulator in the Grimm universe.
Here's what made Renard untouchable. He had connections to virtually every organization introduced across the entire series. The Royals, the Verrat, the Resistance, the police, the vessen community, Black Claw, you name it. The only group he wasn't connected to was the Grimms themselves, and that's only because Grimms were so rare and loosely organized that there wasn't really anything to infiltrate.
He managed to get others to do whatever he wanted. He fooled multiple organizations into believing they could trust him. He was the man behind the man for most of the chaos in Portland, secretly pulling the strings on local Hexenbiests and even Grimm Reapers. And the most impressive part? He did all of this while maintaining his position as Nick's police captain, hiding in plain sight as a pillar of legitimate authority.
His character arc is a masterclass in moral ambiguity. In season one, he was essentially the main villain, manipulating Adalind into trying to kill Nick's Aunt Marie and scheming to get his hands on the mystical keys. Then came the Coins of Zakynthos, which foreshadowed his deepest weakness, a raw, consuming hunger for power. By season two, the show revealed he was actually supporting the Resistance, working to undermine his own family's efforts to dominate the world. He transformed into an anti-hero. Then in season five, Black Claw pulled him back to the dark side. He became Portland's mayor, turned on Nick and the team, and by the first three episodes of season six, he was the main villain once again.
He wasn't a villain who became a hero. He wasn't a hero who became a villain. He was a man who became whatever he needed to be, whenever he needed to be it, and that's infinitely more dangerous than either.
The Grimm writers described his Zauberbiest nature perfectly. Zauberbiests are wizards, and he's shady enough to be called evil. But that shadiness was the point. Renard never committed to any side because commitment would have limited his options. And a man with limited options is a man who can be predicted. Sean Renard was never, not once in a hundred and twenty-three episodes, predictable.
So there you have it. Six villains, six seasons, and six very different flavors of genius. From Kenneth's ruthless efficiency to Zerstörer's ancient patience, from Eric's cultured sadism to Adalind's biological warfare creativity, from Bonaparte's empire-building vision to Renard's unmatched shapeshifting loyalty. What all of them understood, and what made Grimm such a compelling show, is that in a world full of monsters, the most dangerous creature isn't the one with the biggest claws. It's the one who convinces you to put yours away.
The smartest villains in Grimm didn't just threaten Nick Burkhardt. They made him question everything. His allies, his mission, even the woman lying next to him in bed. And for a show inspired by fairy tales, that might be the most Brothers Grimm thing about it. The real monsters were never hiding under the bed. They were sitting across the desk from you at work, smiling, and asking how your day was going.