Top Gun’s Greatest Characters Ranked: From Maverick To Iceman

Top Gun and its sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, feature several great characters that make the two movies beloved action-adventure releases. Tony Scott directed the original Top Gun with a young Tom Cruise in the lead role as a young naval officer with the call sign of Maverick, who began training for the prestigious Top Gun flight program.

One of the few movies to have a sequel over 20 years after the original, Top Gun: Maverick arrived 36 years later with Tom Cruise back as a teacher, helping to train the new generation of TOPGUN graduates. These two movies feature several great characters, including both pilots and commanding officers, but some are better than others.

Goose

Anthony Edwards had a challenging role in the original Top Gun movie. He was going to die, and it was Goose’s death that raised doubt in Maverick’s mind and eventually propelled him to greatness. This meant that he had to appear as a likable character and be someone the fans didn’t want to see die, helping them share Maverick’s grief.

Edwards did a great job in this critical role. Goose was Maverick’s radar intercept officer and best friend when he died in an accident. Maverick was able to eject from the plane, but Goose slammed into the canopy, dying on impact. Before this, Goose and Maverick shared some great scenes, and the memory of this character drove both films.

Viper

Tom Skerritt played Viper in the first Top Gun movie, the commanding officer and instructor at the TOPGUN school. His character is more nuanced thanks to his history as a Vietnam veteran who served alongside Maverick’s father, making him someone who wants to see the impulsive young pilot succeed.

However, making him more of a mentor character also lessens his impact on the film’s tension, which is why he is not quite as interesting as the sequel’s Cyclone, who is more antagonistic toward Maverick.

However, this also gives him some juicy scenes, such as when he talks to Maverick about how the young pilot’s father died in Vietnam, and he explains that there are times when people die as heroes. It is this moment that helps push Maverick on, and it helps that Skerritt was one of the best actors in that first film.

Hangman

Ever since his appearance in Top Gun: Maverick, Glen Powell has become a massive star. He went on to lead the way in Twisters, another sequel to a beloved classic movie, and took on a role in the Stephen King adaptation The Running Man in 2025. In Top Gun: Maverick, Powell plays a recruit named Hangman.

Hangman takes on the same antagonistic role against Rooster that Val Kilmer took on in the first movie for Maverick. He served as a foil character through much of the film, as he bullied Rooster throughout the film, and none of his fellow recruits liked him. However, he did have a entertaining redemption arc in the third act of the movie, so he emerged from it better than he could have.

Cyclone

Cyclone was a slight antagonist in Top Gun: Maverick. Unlike Viper in the first movie, Cyclone had no soft spot for Maverick and was mainly against the veteran pilot coming in to help teach the recruits. Instead, he pushed back and made things more difficult for Maverick than they should have been.

It is essential to have antagonistic characters pushing back against the heroes. Unlike Hangman, Cyclone was not as disruptive because his pushback made more sense since it wasn’t driven by arrogance. His character also improved throughout the movie, since he began to warm up to Maverick when he finally understood his style.

As with Tom Skerritt in Top Gun, it also helps that Jon Hamm plays Cyclone, as he always brings something interesting to everything he does. What holds him down is that his character is thinly written, but Hamm does the best with what he is given.

Hondo

In the first Top Gun movie, Maverick had Viper at his back, pushing him on and giving him valuable advice to help him succeed at the TOPGUN academy and in life itself. In the sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, that role was played by Bashir Salahuddin as Chief Warrant Officer Bernie Coleman.

Hondo showed from the start he had Maverick’s back as he helped him with the mission to go Mach 10 at the beginning of the sequel. He put his career on the line and then remained in Maverick’s corner for the rest of the movie.

Hondo is an interesting character because he is there as one of Maverick’s only friends in a movie world where it is explained that Maverick struggles to maintain relationships. While his backstory and importance were never explained in detail, it was still nice to see someone have Maverick’s back.

Charlie

When Kelly McGillis played Charlie in the first Top Gun movie, she became a star as the love interest for Tom Cruise’s Maverick. However, what really makes her stand out as such a great supporting character was the comparison to the love interest in Top Gun: Maverick, Penny.

While Jennifer Connelly is a great actress, her character of Penny was paper-thin in the Top Gun sequel and never matched the level set by Kelly McGillis three decades earlier.

However, Charlie was intelligent and fearless and proved she could hang in there with the flyboys, proving that she was more than able to put Maverick in his place when needed. It was also nice to see her as a woman in a position of authority in Top Gun, capable of leading these young pilots to greatness.

Rooster

Rooster was supposed to be the big new lead in Top Gun: Maverick. He was the impulsive member of the team, much like Maverick had been years before. However, he also needed to carry the most emotional story of the movie since his dad was Goose, and he blames Maverick for growing up without a father.

Rooster had a challenging role in the new movie, since he was the best pilot and had a lot to prove, but Maverick was overprotective since he didn’t want Rooster to face the same fate as Goose years before. This caused the central conflict of the movie, but it was often hard to side with the cocky Rooster over the beloved Maverick.

It did help that Miles Teller looked like he could be Anthony Edwards’ son, and his story and rivalry with Hangman were the heart of the movie, so he at least served his role in that area, although he never matched up to Tom Cruise before him.

Phoenix

One of the significant issues with the original Top Gun movie was its lack of diversity. While Charlie was a strong, powerful woman in that film, the class of pilots was all male and lacked women and people of color. Top Gun: Maverick fixed that problem, and the best new character was a female pilot called Phoenix.

Played by Monica Barbaro, Phoenix is one of the top pilots at TOPGUN, and she fits in with her fellow teammates, including starting a nice friendship with Rooster. She is also a gun character, delivering sarcastic one-liners while avoiding bragging and trying not to draw attention to herself, letting her skills do the talking.

Phoenix is also part of one of the best duos in the film, as her chemistry with Lewis Pullman’s Bob is fantastic, and it remains a highlight anytime these two characters share the screen.

Iceman

The choice for the best character in the first Top Gun was always a tough choice between fans of Tom Cruise and his Maverick or the ultra-cool Val Kilmer and his antagonistic Iceman. By the time Top Gun: Maverick came out, even more people had sided with Iceman as the coolest character in either movie.

However, sadly, Iceman had a small yet essential role in the sequel. Actor Val Kilmer, who had largely lost the use of his voice due to cancer, shared an emotional scene with Tom Cruise that solidified his importance to the franchise and showed fans why they loved him so much.

In the first film, Iceman was antagonistic and played the role that Hangman played in the new movie. However, Iceman was drastically better than Hangman in every way, thanks mostly to Kilmer’s iconic performance in the role.

Maverick

The best character in the Top Gun movies is easily Maverick. Played by Tom Cruise, Maverick was the hotshot young pilot in the first movie who was willing to do anything and often acted impulsively, which led to tragedy when his partner Goose died in a plane ejection.

However, he was also someone who learned from his losses and became a better pilot and teammate by learning from his mistakes. By the second movie, he was older, but he was still mostly impulsive and seemed to have regressed somewhat since the first movie.

Despite this, Tom Cruise’s star power pushes Maverick to iconic status, and it is impossible not to get behind him in either Top Gun movie and cheer him on when he finally achieves his dreams.