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Hello!  I’d like to start by saying to take everything I say with a grain of salt, because I am definitely not the most experienced writer on earth, and have plenty of problems of my own.

But I’ve been writing a villain recently in my WIP, so I thought maybe I could help.  He’s a psychopathic, chilling, but perfectly brilliant character, with the flawless art of pulling off totally fake personalities for different people.  He’s the type in a dark suit, immaculate living place, and a million intricate plans up his sleeve.  I know that’s all somewhat cliche, but I’ve worked hard and put a lot of work into pulling him off freshly.  Hopefully I’ll manage it in the end.

Anyway, some tips I would give are, if you want him to be nice but evil underneath, try to get in his head.  Focus, or make a list of his objectives, just so they’re totally clear to you.  Make certain everything he does falls in line with his own plan, make sure that he is self-centered underneath.  If he needs to conceal his villainy, he may do a very good job of acting nice, and going along with the others, even seeming self-sacrificial and heroic.  And there are definitely villains who are genuinely nice people, who have wrong beliefs, but as you said “evil”, I’m assuming he’s not a really nice guy underneath.  So, if you can keep his own personal goals in mind, and make sure everything he intentionally does lines up with his dastardly goals.  And if you can stay accurate to that, some things about him will most likely begin to seem “off”.  Maybe they other characters will notice, or maybe just the readers, but sooner or later some one will notice that he’s always around when something bad happens, or he always manages to not be around when certain things happen, or everything he does somehow works out for him better than anyone else, things like that.  Maybe just things that point to him being not as nice a person as people thought, so the readers are still surprised when he turns out to be the villain.  This works especially well when you have another super obvious “villain” to distract the readers with, because they’ll just assume they already know who the bad guy is.  But since I don’t know that much about your story, I don’t know if that would work or not.

Anyway, I’d recommend finding an extensive character profiling list to fill in.  When in doubt, I always do that, and it works magic.  Just answering the questions about them and working out who they are as a person is unbelievably helpful.  It puts you right inside their head so you can make in character decisions  for them, and they’ll just practically live through the story themselves.

I have a really good one that’s super long and deep.  I don’t usually fill it all in, just the parts I need.  If you’d like me to, I could copy and paste it to you here in a comment.  Just let me know.

That’s all I got.  Hopefully some one else can chime in.  I’m used to just working things out in my own head, and so I don’t really know how to give advice, but I hope that helps you some.

Good luck! 🙂