A guard who takes the job everyone else refuses, hates himself for it, and gets one chance to put it down.
Skurge is Loki’s choice to replace Heimdall as gatekeeper of the Bifrost, and is promoted to Executioner when Hela takes Asgard. He is played, for most of the film, as comic and servile and a little vacant: a man who wants to be near power and does not think about what he is being asked to do.
Then he sees what is happening to the people of Asgard, changes sides, and sacrifices himself covering their evacuation. Karl Urban gets about four minutes to make that turn believable and does it.
Show detailsRagnarok, and the comics
In the comics the Executioner is Skurge, and the moment he is remembered for is holding a bridge alone so that others can escape. Thor: Ragnarok does not adapt that story, but it gives him the same ending, in a doorway, with the same point.