Schwarzenegger definitely doesn’t play himself in his action roles; the world has seen enough of him in his political career to be sure of this. It’s not even fair to say that he plays the same character in every movie; the eponymous Terminator and Kindergarten Cop’s John Kimble are pretty far apart in characterization.
The same thing can be said of Sylvester Stallone: outside of acting he’s a successful, educated screenwriter and director, and this comes across clearly in interviews. His acting roles are also quite varied. Not that he’s shown an absolutely huge range, but the characters at least aren’t mere carbon copies of each other.
I haven’t seen enough of Jean Claude van Damme, Steven Seagal, and Chuck Norris off the silver screen to know whether they’re just playing themselves, though there are certainly plenty of other action stars for whom this isn’t true. Dolph Lundgren, for example, often plays brainless muscle men, but in real life he’s got a master’s degree in chemical engineering.
Alan Hale Jr. (The “Skipper” on Gilligan’s Island.)
The person doing the casing for the show was eating out one night and heard a friendly laugh coming from another table. He thought, that’s the laugh I want from the skipper, turned around at saw Alan Hale Jr.
It was Sarah Vowell who observed that Michael Douglas no longer plays anything but rich men.
Type-casting (eg. Bob Denver unable to find work after Gilligan) vs self-typecasting (beauties and beefcakes rolling with it as long as they can).
Or people behind the camera who either found their comfort zone/axe to grind: after a certain point Mike Nichols could only make movies about rich people; Aaron Sorkin about smart, sanctimonious people, and Ken Burns has to point out how racism is always there somewhere.
I haven’t seen some of his more recent movies but his last project was The Kominsky Method in which he definitely was not rich. But talking in absolutes is fun.
Ha! ISWYDT. And yes, I think he tends to play the same character over and over again. But that character was absolutely perfect for Bull Durham, which I think was his very best movie, and one of the best baseball movies ever made. (Tim Robbins, on the other hand, was waaayy out of place…)
It’s kinda like Jimmy Stewart, or Cary Grant. It was the uncommon film in which you didn’t think, Hey, that’s Kevin Costner up there." Generally a likable enough, middle-of-the-road emotional range guy.
I think there’s evidence to suggest Seagal and Norris believe they are playing themselves. Van Damme seems to have more of a sense of fun and humor about his job.
I don’t know how anyone can look at the four roles I named and say he was playing the same character or himself. Does someone have to use a wacky voice or pretend to have a disability to not be seen as playing themselves? He plays characters in the normal range of people but they are certainly not all the same. Granted a certain amount of his work is similar not all.
A friend of mine was on the production team for one of Van Damme’s low-budget direct-to-video films a few years ago. She told me that he was extremely personable, kind and respectful to the people working on the film, and didn’t come across as a big-ego movie star in the slightest.
The obvious ‘outlier’ film in Van Damme’s career was JCVD
The plot has Van Damme as a (fictionalised?) version of himself as a washed up has been action film actor who gets caught up in a bank robbery. The film presents Van Damme as a pretty worthless failure. Van Damme delivers a corrosive self hating soliloquy at one point.