Think of an actor/actress who play a role that is different from their previous well known role.
Cree Summers who plays Elmyra http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098929/
Also plays Foxxy Love http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386180/
As soon as I hear Foxxy Love’s voice, I knew that was Cree Summer. Did they ever have injokes to Cree Summers previous roles?
Thread title corrected for grammar and so’s people can figure out what the heck you’re asking.
– Uke, mod
Elijah Wood seems to enjoy shaking things up. Can’t get much farther apart than Frodo and a cannabalistic serial killer.
You mean like Keanu Reeves, God of Shakespeare?
He was a creep in Eternal Sunshine as well.
Kevin Bacon in The Woodsman.
Kevin Bacon in every other role he has done, eg My Dog Skip
Wilford Brimley, playing the big, happy grampa type in all sorts of movies… and the evil corporate lawyer in The Firm.
Charlize Theron in Monster, playing serial killer Aileen Wournos. I saw that recently, and damn!
Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs
Mel Gidson in Hamlet
WKRP’s Mr. Carson Gordon Jump as a child molester on Different Strokes.
Andy Griffith played a total bastard (and very well) in a couple of movies: A Face in the Crowd and Murder in Coweta County
Max von Sydow played Jesus in Greatest Story Ever Told and Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon. (Bela Lugosi played Christ in a Passion Play, but not on film, thus making him Prince of Peace and Prince of Darkness in his career.)
Tony Curtis’s drag turn in Some Like it Hot was pretty contradictory to The Boston Strangler.
Megan Mullally has gotten rich and famous playing Karen in the mediocre Will & Grace but is a fantastic character actress, playing everything from whitetrash moms to hysterical housewives in other films.
The actress whose talent most surprised me was probably Jean Smart of Designing Women. I assumed she was similar to her persona on that show- dim, limited, etc., but since it went off she’s played everything from a retarded mother desperate to keep her children to a woman who finds out her husband is gay to a hysterical drugged up romance author to an anal Martha Stewart clone to an oversexed alcoholic housewife to an aristocratic Charlestonian iconoclast and has done fantastically in all of them whether comedy or melodrama.
Ian McKellen’s Gandalf is a far cry from his remorseless ex-Nazi in Apt Pupil or Magneto or his sinister-sexy Richard III.
And All in the Family wing: Jean Stapleton followed her typecasting as Edith Bunker with turns as Eleanor Roosevelt, a Jewish grandma, a foul mouthed motel owner (Michael) and a Bible thumping talker in a Horton Foote teleplay. Her co-star Carroll O’Connor (who in real life was extremely well read) went from Bronx blustering Archie to laid back and bright Southern sheriff in Heat of the Night (though the sheriff wasn’t very capable seeing how there 30 murders a year in his tiny town).
Angela Lansbury is probably best known to younger people today as dowdy sweet Jessica Fletcher or Mrs. Potts, but she played more than a few villains on-stage (where Mrs. Lovett was probably her great turn) and in film as well as the sexpot in Gaslight.
Jeremy Irons played Jesus/Judas on stage in “Godspell” and Humbert Humbert in “Lolita.”
For me, the Chameleon King of Hollywood is Gary Oldman. I don’t go out of my way to find out who all the actors are in a movie before I see it, because I like to watch the movie and be surprised with “Hey! It’s that guy from…”
There have been several times I’ve seen Gary Oldman in parts and thought, “Wow, this guy is great! Who the heck is he? He should get more work!” and then I see his name in the closing credits…
Jimmy Gordon in Batman Returns
Sirius Black in Harry Potter
Mason Verger in Hannibal
Pontius Pilate in Jesus
Jean-Baptiste Emmanual Zorg in The Fifth Element
Dr. Smith in Lost in Space
Beethoven in Immortal Beloved
Evil cop in Leon
Dracula in, well, Dracula
etc.
Mary Tyler Moore went from sweet Mary Richards to a woman who kidnapped poor babies to sell them to wealthy infertile couples. (I think this was based on a real person.)
Fred MacMurray - Genial good guy in Disney’s “The Shaggy Dog”, “The Absent Minded Professor” and “Son ofFlubber”, and a great hard-assed bad guy in “Double Indemnity” and “The Appartment”.
Though Gary Oldman is incredably tallented aren’t nearly all those characters Psychotic or borderline insane intellectuals. Has he ever played a happy go lucky fool?
Rosencrantz.
Or possibly Guildenstern.
Last time I checked, Commissioner Gordon was fairly happy go lucky. Certainly not psychotic in any way.
Just recently I thought, “Gosh, that Sean Bean always plays a bad guy. Why don’t they ever give him a good-guy role? He’s good-looking, maybe even the romantic lead.”
No long after that he showed up in **North Country ** as a perfectly lovely guy.