Typecast actors are those who become so strongly associated with a certain role that it becomes hard for audiences to accept them as any other character.
Who are some actors who are not generally considered to be typecast, but who you personally always associate with a particular character or role, to the extent that it’s only you who can’t see past it?
For me and my partner, it has to be Bill Irwin. Despite being a versatile, award-winning performer appearing in all sorts of comedies and dramas, for us he will always be Pickles, Harry Solomon’s alien dog on 3rd Rock from the Sun:
Whenever he pops up in some show we’re watching (most recently an utterly serious role in the costume drama The Gilded Age), we immediately jump out of our seats, frantically point at the screen, and excitedly shout, “It’s Pickles! Pickles!!”
Poor Bill—I’m sure this isn’t the role you wanted us to remember you for, but you nailed that dog so well that we’ll never see you as anything else.
Oliver Platt is a versatile actor, with a long career, but to me, he will always be the brash, witty Porthos the Pirate in Disney’s 1993 version of The Three Musketeers.
A bunch for me, a few right now though, just off the top of my head:
Matthew McConaughey is ‘Wooderson’ from ‘Dazed and Confused’. In everything else I see him in, he seems so out of character to me.
Ben Afleck will always be “O’Banion’ from the same film above.
Ron Livingston is simply “Nix”, or Captain Lew Nixon from ‘Band of Brothers’, first and foremost, though is character as Peter Gibbons from ‘Office Space’ gives him a good run for his money.
Jason Statham as Bacon/Turkish in ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels/Snatch ( respectively )
Or Jamie Lee Curtis as a grouchy, punishment-enforcing mom (as she was in How to Deal and Freaky Friday).
Or many Canadian actors who were in Kevin Sullivan’s “Anne of Green Gables” miniseries and sequel film and his spinoff “Road to Avonlea” series. For me, Megan Follows will always be Anne Shirley, Colleen Dewhurst will be Marilla Cuthbert, Cedric Smith will be Alec King, Gema Zamprogna Felicity King, Zachary Bennett Felix King, Jackie Burroughs Hetty King, Mag Ruffman Olivia Dale nee King, and R. H. Thompson Jasper Dale.
There’s an actor whose name I don’t even know-- he’s a “THAT guy!” Once, in an episode of L&O: TOS, he played a VERY creepy stalker-killer, and that’s all I can ever see him as since, even though for a while he was popping up some place different every other week.
Kind of a reverse of what you are asking, I thought I’d never be able to see Lucy Lawless as anyone but Xena; maybe it says something about her acting that I was wrong. Even when she played one of the lookalike characters in an episode of Xena, I could see the character-- and now that she is doing a very similar character in My Life Is Murder, I still don’t see Xena.
I do have trouble seeing Renee O’Connor as anyone but Gabrielle, though.
Neal McDonough has made a good career out of playing heartless crooks. I have heard this is by design, he’s very religious and choose roles where he’s pretty sure he won’t be kissing someone.
But for me he’ll always be the very competent and empathic Buck Compton from Band of Brothers. It feels wrong seeing him as a bad’un.
