You missed Punch Drunk Love. I thought he was pretty good in that, too, thought even better in Uncut Gems.
ETA: Kneadtoknow beat me to it.
She was also hilarious as Lady Tottingham (“Call me ‘Totty.’”) in Aardman’s The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
Did Jimmy Stewart ever play “the bad guy”?
I think his good guy image sometimes would backfire. For example, in “The Flight of the Phoenix”, you know he’s going to do the right thing, so that “squabble” with the German scientist wasn’t believable.
He was awesome in
AFTER THE THIN MAN, where his aw-shucks demeanor makes him perfect for a talky whodunit where the killer tries to pass himself off as an innocent man.
In recent years she’s specialized more as deranged villainesses or oddballs: Beatrix Lestrange in the Harry Potter movies, Madame Thenardier in Les Miserables, Mrs. Lovett in Sweeny Todd, the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations.
In John Ford’s “Two Rode Together”, he played a downright morally bankrupt, corrupt Marshall with no redeeming features whatsoever. Richard Widmark is the good guy in that.
Retroactive playing against type: Roger E. Mosley as a ruthless loan shark encountered by Jim Rockford. This was three years before playing Magnum’s friend and a bit jarring when watching retro TV.
The ultimate playing against type—no other examples can beat this—:
Marcel Marceau in Silent Movie, speaking the only word spoken aloud in the entire flick.
“Non!”
I remember that episode.
Electric Larry: Smick, the club soda dispenser in the bar is busted
Harry Smick: It was fixed last week.
Electric Larry: Uh huh, fixed last week. You go down there and tell that to the customer standing there drinking scotch and air.
I loved it, too.
Did I miss someone else mentioning Jim Carrey in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?” He and Kate Winslet both play against type. He’s more buttoned-down and subdued, and she’s the wild one.
Sascha Baron Cohen’s performance in The Spy was convincing, sensitive and subtle. These three words have NEVER been used in relation to any of his earlier work.
Wow, interesting. I was watching a John Ford documentary last night, and when this came on, I FF’d it because I was planning to watch it one day, and didn’t wanna know. On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate this? (I have 1,400 on my watchlist!)
What about actors playing against in such a way that the arc of their careers was altered forever?
Kurt Russell had been in movies and television for 20 years - starting with Dennis the Menace! - playing mostly Disney movie kids of one sort or another or goofballs with hearts of gold like in Used Cars.
Then in 1981 John Carpenter turned him into Snake Plissken - I heard he was dead - and suddenly he had a new career as an action star that’s lasted to this day.
Or…
I can’t be the only one here old enough to remember being surprised when it was announced that Bruce Willis - who had a career going as a TV funnyman - was going to star in an action shoot-em-up called ‘Die Hard’. I remember discussing it with my pals and being just confused. “The guy from Moonlighting? Really?”
My favorite is Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. They cast him as the father of Indiana Jones because he was James Bond. And they allowed him to be 100% opposite of James Bond, which made the whole thing so great. It’s probably my favorite performance of his.
And that flick and BATMAN went #1 and #2 in the world that year — and the other way around in the United States — and I remember the eyebrow-raising o’er the land when Michael “Mr. Mom” Keaton got announced for that one. You know, the guy who’d done a sitcom with Mary Tyler Moore before doing some light comedy with Henry Winkler and Shelley Long, and who memorably clowned around as Beetlejuice after joking his way through a parody movie with some SNL types?
Okay, so: maybe this will be some Adam-West-type stuff? Like, maybe the short list was him or Bill Murray for the title role? Yeah, I guess I could see that; pretty sure he won’t be portraying the character as grimly driven to put people in the hospital before using military hardware to gun down crooks. I mean, there’s no way you’ll look at this guy’s eyes and say, you know, he genuinely seems obsessive enough to put on a bulletproof Dracula costume and dangle a terrified mugger off a rooftop.
Watch North Sea Hijack a.k.a. ffolkes a.k.a. Assault Force, in which Roger Moore plays the Anti-Bond. “He loves cats, hates women, and is about to save the world.”
Watch The Tailor of Panama, in which Pierce Brosnan plays the Anti-Bond. He still drinks, smokes, and womanizes, but in this movie, it comes across as sleazy rather than cool.
I’d give it a solid 8. It’s a good classic Ford western, maybe not his best, but solid. James Stewart plays the sleazy marshal totally convincingly, and every other major character is disgusted by him.
Jim Carrey in The Truman Show.
What an excellent film!!! He’s still doing the nutty-zany schtick but without the painful excess of prior films. Not performing against type, IMO.
John Ritter plays the villain in an episode of Law & Order, and he’s great, especially because he’s playing the kind of psychopath who doesn’t know he’s a psychopath, and admits to things because he doesn’t even get just how terrible they sound.
Henry Winkler is the villain on a L&O as well.
Ooooooh! Escape to Witch Mountain was one of my favorites when I was a kid! I liked Kim Richards enough that I actually watched every episode of that sitcom she was on with McLean Stevenson. I didn’t know she was still working.
Some of my nominees are Ingrid Bergman in the 1941 Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. She plays the “bad girl,” with Lana Turner playing the good girl. It was supposed to be the other way around, but Bergman begged the casting director to give her a chance to play something besides an ingenue.
Admittedly, she isn’t as good as Miriam Hopkins in the 1931 version, but Hopkins had the advantage of playing the role before the institution of the Hays code. But within the bounds of the Hays code, Bergman is very good.
In A Passage to India, Judy Davis plays against type (she usually plays outspoken rebels) as Adela Quested. She is perfect in this role.
In The Poseidon Adventure, Shelley Winters, who usually plays loud, selfish, self-indulgent drunks, plays a kind, quiet, unimposing woman, whose talents aren’t even revealed until they are needed (she’s not a braggart), and then she uses them to sacrifice herself so other people can escape and live.