Guardians of the Galaxy — Characters & Cast

Initially money and self-preservation; underneath, a grief-driven need to matter and to belong somewhere after being torn from Earth as a child.

Begins as a self-mythologizing scavenger who cannot even get people to use his nickname, and ends as the one who chooses the galaxy over the payday. His growth is measured by what he stops running from: he faces his mother's death, takes her hand in memory as he takes his crew's hands in fact, and accepts a leadership role he spent the film pretending he didn't want.

To break free of the adoptive father who tortured and rebuilt her, and to keep the Stone away from anyone who would use it as he would.

Introduced as Thanos's most lethal instrument, she is already planning her betrayal when we meet her and spends the film proving it — first to Ronan, then to a crew who have every reason to distrust her. She moves from operating alone to trusting others with her life, which for her is the harder act.

Avenging the murder of his wife and daughter — a debt he eventually agrees to defer for the sake of the living.

Drives the plot into disaster by summoning Ronan out of pure revenge, then must learn that his private vendetta is worth less than the people standing beside him. His literal-mindedness turns from a joke into a virtue — he is the only one who says exactly what he feels, and he is the one who names the group as friends.

Money and escape, driven by rage at the people who built him and a terror of being seen as a thing rather than someone.

The most defended character in the film, hiding behind heists, insults and heavy weaponry. His shell cracks in the drunken confession about being an experiment nobody asked to create, and shatters entirely when Groot dies — the moment he stops being a mercenary and becomes part of a family.

Loyalty to Rocket, extended outward to the whole group; an uncomplicated instinct to protect.

Communicating in three words, Groot travels from muscle-for-hire to the film's moral center. His decision to cocoon the crew during the crash — 'We are Groot' — is the story's thesis spoken aloud, and his regrowth as a dancing sapling turns the ending from an elegy into a beginning.