How about John Travolta in Get Shorty?
And, Kevin Bacon in JFK.
Or, for that matter, how about John Candy in JFK?
Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood. I’m old enough to remember him best as the commander from Space:1999 and a few reruns of Mission: Impossible, but had no idea he could pull off something like that. It seems to happen a lot that I’ll go to see Johnny Depp in a movie and end up totally mesmerized by another actor (Geoffrey Rush in POTC, for instance).
Yup, whenever I watched it I was like, “damn, I bet that fake language was hard as hell to learn.”
Paul Giamatti in just about everything he’s in these days. This guy is just great overall…
Sean Penn - The Assassination of Richard Nixon
Leonardo DiCaprio in The Basketball Diaries. Wow, was NOT ready for that at all when I saw it.
Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Up until then, he had played angry young men. That fantastic comedic performance came right out of left field.
“What are you doing?”
“Learning about Cuba, and having some food!”
Speaking of which, while I don’t have that opinion about The Rock, I do about Vin Diesel. Wasn’t impressed at all in xXx, but he was a very good actor in Chronicles of Riddick (never saw Pitch Black.) Often, the epic action movie tough-guy character doesn’t allow for a lot of acting and character building, but within that scope, he was a good actor in that role.
In the credits at the beginning, “Anthony Perkins” comes up. When I watched Catch-22 with my friends, everyone said all at once, “Anthony Hopkins is in this movie!” I had to correct them.
Anthony Hopkins’ best movie pre-Hannibal, in my opinion, is Magic. His acting in it is amazing. If you’ve seen it, that scene in the cabin where Burgess Meredith’s character tests Corky (Hopkins) to see if he can go five minutes without his dummy saying anything…one of the most tense scenes I’ve ever seen.
Speaking of Jon Voight, audiences now mostly know him as a father figure/authority figure/bad guy, but way back in the day he was really good at playing strung-out, desperate characters. Like in this scene from The Champ (skip ahead to about 2:47.) You have to be a pretty good actor to pretend to be that angry at a little kid. (By the way, how could those supervisors in the room just let him hit the kid like that?)
If Riddick surprised you, Vin Diesel as Jackie DiNorscio in Find Me Guilty will shock you. Not a trace of Riddick, or any other action character in there.
I might not say this about anyone else in the role, but Sylvester Stallone in CopLand surprised the hell out of me. I didn’t expect any real depth from him, but I was impressed.
Having already seen him in The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island I already knew how great an actor he was. (He never mentioned it specifically on interviews, but I wondered if he ever referenced that period of his career when he was “becoming Bela”.)
Also from Ed Wood: Bill Murray as Bunny was excellent.
I thought Philip Seymour Hoffman, who I generally like, was way overlauded for the lead in Capote, but I thought Toby Jones was spellbinding in Infamous- the better movie all around. He should have been nominated for an Oscar and perhaps would have been had PSH not just gotten one for a different version of the same story.
Ludacris in Crash.
It’s very faint praise as I hated that movie. I thought it was awful and trite and about as deep as the average college freshman who has just discovered pot & philosophy in the same week.
But I did think that Ludacris didn’t suck (which is what I was expecting), especially given the idiotic lines he was given.
Not being a fan of hip-hop, I’d never heard of Dante Terrell Smith, aka Mos Def, before seeing the 2004 HBO movie, Something the Lord Made, a docu-drama about heart surgery pioneer Vivien Thomas. As Wikipedia notes, Thomas “was an African-American surgical technician who helped develop the procedures used to treat blue baby syndrome in the 1940s. Without any education past high school, Thomas rose above poverty and racism to become a cardiac surgery pioneer and a teacher to many of the country’s most prominent surgeons.”
Mos Def’s performance was simply stunning. He held his own opposite co-star Alan Rickman, no mean feat.
Although I had never seen him before, it turns out Mos Def has been acting since 1991, when he was 18. He’s been seen more recently as Ford Prefect in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and opposite Bruce Willis in 16 Blocks. But those roles were nothing compared to his performance in Something the Lord Made. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.
Oh, goody, I get to be the first to name:
Kirsten Dunst in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
I’d seen her in Dick and Spider-Man, but while she was good, I didn’t think there was any great acting involved in her characters, it seemed more like breezy fun. In Eternal Sunshine, the look of shock and horror on her face when she found out that she’d previously had an affair with the doctor, who had subsequently erased her memory, a practice she had previously found laudable was ultra-believable. That was some damn fine acting.
So many replies that I absolutely agree with.
How about Greg Kinnear in “As Good as it Gets”. I thought his performance was better than Helen Hunt’s and Jack Nicholson’s.
I was also very touched by Sean Combs (or whatever his moniker was at that time) in " Monster’s Ball". He did a lot with a small but pivotal role.
Oh, sorry, I forgot to add Kevin Costner in his new movie “Mr. Brooks”. I have a vague recollection of jumping on the Costner bandwagon of the '80s and then not seeing any of his movies since then. Wowie; what a great performance in a very interesting flick.
Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. Although he was by no means the best actor in that movie, I had always thought of him as “just another action dude” (with a noticeable talent for picking good movies). I was amazed that he made a believeable child psychologist.
Sigourney Weaver in Galaxy Quest. I never would have thought she could do comedy.
Geena Davis in Thelma and Louise. Not just a pretty face.
I’m the first one to say “Hugh Laurie as House”? The guy was known as a comedic actor and a musician, and he just owns and will be remembered always for this role.
I was roped into watching 16 Blocks against my will a few months ago, and I too was surprised by how good Mos Def was. I’ll have to see if Netflix has Something the Lord Made…
I never looked at John Ritter the same way again after seeing him play a psychopathic killer robot on Buffy. Laugh if you like, but that man had a talent for playing it dark that was never fully explored.
RIP, John.
Oh, yes!
I’d never really noticed Hugh Laurie before–I knew he did slapsticky British comedy and that’s not really my cup of tea (I love Brit comedy but prefer the more sardonic dry style). But I read the description of “House” in the TV Guide Fall Preview issue back before Season 1 started and decided to give the pilot a try because the House character sounded like one I would really like. I wasn’t wrong–I’ve been a big fan ever since. Laurie is amazing in this show–it’s almost like he becomes a different person when playing House.
Oh I must second Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine…, Adam Sandler in Spanglish and Greg Kinnear in As Good as It Gets! They say comedy is tragedy upside down, and these three performances showed comic actors can bring the pain too.
I’ll add Steve Carell for 40 Year Old Virgin, especially for the scene where his virginity is revealed to his friends and they mock him. The camera shows an intense closeup of his face, and you can read every last thought going through Andy’s mind as he tries to hide his mortification. Great work.
Another perfromance that surprised me: David Thewlis’s subtle work in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I was fascinated by his portrayal of Lupin (I’d not read the books nor seen any other movies, and in fact had only been half-watching the movie until he strutted his stuff). I didn’t even realize it was Thewlis. Years earlier I’d seen him rip up the small screen as a brutish pedophile pimp in Prime Suspect 3, and he’s played so many scummy sleazebags that I would never have imagined him as kind, gentle, tortured Remus Lupin. I wasn’t expecting that kind of subtlety in a Harry Potter movie.
Two more: Gary Cole as Lucas Buck and Jake Weber as Dr. Matt Crower in American Gothic, a one-season CBS drama from 1995-96. I’d only seen Cole as straightforward nice guys before, but his Lucas Buck was a master of evil with a deep strain of black humor. And scorchingly sexy! Weber’s Crower was another role like Remus Lupin – outwardly benign, inwardly tormented by a dark secret; every scene Weber was in was a masterclass of nuanced acting. Amazing work by both actors.