It’s pretty common, especially in sitcoms, for an actor or actress to play a character with the same first name, like Woody Harrelson playing Woody Boyd or Charlie Sheen playing Charlie Harper. Have there been any instances in movies or TV where an actor played a character with a different first name but the same last name?
Charles Robinson played Mac Robinson on Night Court.
Will Smith played William ‘Will’ Smith on Fresh Prince of Bel Air, but that’s probably not what you’re looking for…
There was an SNL sketch where Natalie Portman played a girl named “Rebecca Hershlag”…
In The Pretender, Andrea Parker played Miss Parker. Miss Parker’s first name was eventually revealed to be “Catherine.”
There was an Australian comedy called The Games in which the lead actors, John Clarke, Bryan Dawe, and Gina Riley, played characters named John Clarke, Bryan Dawe, and Gina Riley, respectively.
Clarke and Dawe also did a video that’s been shared around the internet a bit, The Front Fell Off.
In The Color Purple, Margaret Avery plays Shug Avery.
In Heaven’s Gate, Jeff Bridges plays John L. Bridges.
This is cheating a bit, but in almost all of their films, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy portrayed characters named Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
If you want be strict about the OP’s criteria, Hardy’s birth name was Norvell Hardy. Laurel’s was Arthur Stanley Jefferson, though at some point he had has last name legally changed to Laurel.
The characters on Home Movies were named after the actors who voiced them, with some restrictions, so family members shared the same last names-- that probably isn’t really what you are looking for either, though. But the character voiced by actor Brendon Small is named Brendon Small.
J.D. Lutz plays John Lutz on 30 Rock.
Wilford Brimley played Horace Brimley on The Waltons.
The Fresh Prince, Willard ‘Will’ Smith played William ‘Will’ Smith.
We’re in reruns already?
Marie Osmond portrayed her own mother, Olive Osmond, in Side by Side: The True Story of the Osmond Family, a TV movie from 1982.
Not quite the same thing, but it’s amusing that Richard Dreyfuss played a part in a movie about The Dreyfus Affair. (Can’t remember the movie, but it was a good one.)
Prisoner of Honor Richard Dreyfuss played Colonel Piquart.
Semi-example: Matt Robinson played Gordon on Sesame Street. Years later, the character’s last name was revealed to be “Robinson”…by which time he was being played by Roscoe Orman.
Again, not quite the same thing, but Hugo Drax, the bad guy in the James Bond novel Moonraker, was described as “a Lonsdale kind of character”. (To this day, I don’t know what Fleming meant by that – another of those now-obscure cultural references.)
In the movie Moonraker, Drax was played by actor Michel Lonsdale, who had been Commissaire Paul Lebel, who caught the Jackal in 1972’s Day of the Jackal. I always wondered if they chose him in part because of his last name.
In Chaplin, Geraldine Chaplin played Hannah Chaplin, her grandmother.
Joe Foy, Jr., played his father, Joe Foy, Sr., in Yankee Doodle Dandy
Maybe Fleming’s use of the phase “a Lonsdale kind of character” was a reference to this person:
If we’re going to talk about the casting of people as their ancestors, there’s Desi Arnaz, Jr. playing his father in The Mambo Kings.
Another ‘not quite the same thing’ is Workaholics. The main characters play people with very similar names to themselves:
Blake Anderson is Blake Henderson
Adam DeVine is Adam DeMamp
Anders Holm is Anders Holmvik
Kyle Newacheck is Karl Hevacheck
and I didn’t realize until now, we also have:
Waymond as Waymond
Jillian Bell playing Jillian Belk
and possibly a few others that only had first names in the show. But of course, these weren’t accidents or coincidences, these are on purpose. I’d imagine it makes a difference that a lot of these people got their start in the comedy troupe business.