Sometimes I’ll rewatch a movie I’ve seen years before and realize for the first time that it features a now famous actor or actress I didn’t recognize at the time and didn’t remember as having been in there.
Examples: I didn’t remember
Renee Zellwegger as the bimbo wife suing for divorce in Liar, Liar
Billy Bob Thornton as a gambler in Indecent Proposal
Orlando Bloom as the prostitute Oscar eyes in Wilde
Are there any actors you’ve retrognized upon seeing the movie again?
Billy Bob Thornton as “Johnny Tyler” in Tombstone.
That was actually Jennifer Tilly, not Renee Zellwegger.
Benicio Del Toro as a knife-wielding young henchman in Licence To Kill, the disastrous last Timothy Dalton Bond movie.
Renee Zellwegger is a good one though. I had seen and forgotten her in Reality Bites, 8 Seconds and Empire Recprds before Jerry Maguire and they were all reasonable roles.
I annoy my friends with this habit all the time. I’m hell to watch movies and TV shows with. I may not always know actors’ names but I’ll watch a performance, going, “Where have I seen her/him before?”
“Locke” from Lost was the Stepfather.
Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes in Wildcats.
I swear to God I spotted Michael Clarke Duncan in an uncredited role in *A Soldier’s Story * as the MP who arrests Denzel Washington at the movie’s end. If that’s not him, I want to know who else black in Hollywood is that huge.
NYPD Blue’s Dennis Franz was a Rough House Boy in Popeye.
Realizing that edgy Radio Raheem from Do The Right Thing is now pudgy Joe Robertson in the *Spider-Man * movies.
I just watched the Pacino “Scarface” on DVD (after not having seen the movie for 10 years) and was surprised to see a younger F. Murray Abraham as a drug lord’s henchman.
One of my favorite movies, Dazed and Confused is chock full of soon to be famous people. I think the only one who didn’t go on to become famous was the leads Mitch Kramer and Jason London.
Ben Affleck played a mean and stupid bully, Mathew McConaughey was a creepy older guy who liked to hit on the high school girls. When I saw Saving Private Ryan that German soldier killed Adam Goldberg I thought immediately of the wuss who got his ass kicked at the kegger. Rory Cochran from CSI: Miami played a pot head. Milla Jovovich, Paker Posey.
John Cleese in The Great Muppet Caper. The first time I saw that film, at age ~10, I knew nothing of Monty Python…
MASH episodes can be good for this - I’ve seen Ron Howard, Pat Morita, John Ritter, and a bunch of other character actors.
It’s also fun to watch late, great '80s shows - MacGuyver had Cuba Gooding Jr. on once. I’m sure there more.
Benny Hill in one of the early James Bond films (Moonraker?).
Jackie Chan in Cannon Ball Run II (and he was so young).
I just remembered another one.
John Ratzenberger (Cliff on Cheers), was an American Jeep driver (for C. Bergan playing Margaret Brooke-White) in Ghandi. The weird thing though is that I am sure someone else does his voice.
This is an ongoing contest between Mr. S and me. It’s always a race to see (1) who can figure out where the person is familiar from and (2) who can come up with the definitive line from that other role to make the pther person guess who it is. Yes, we’re movie trivia dorks.
I thought I saw him in one of those Blockbuster “no more late fees” commercials, but Mr. S identified the guy as the photo-place guy who had the hots for George on Seinfeld and sent him a “boudoir” photo of himself. Don’t know if he’s as big as MCD, but he’s quite burly.
Oh, I remember being shocked at seeing The Pathmark Guy (James Karen) become a zombie in Return of The Living Dead.
I don’t think Benny Hill appeared in any of the James Bond films. He did appear in the intro to Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines It was, I believe, one of very few films he did.
Rowan Atkinson (Blackadder, Mr. Bean) appeared with Sean Connery in the non-Eon Bond film Never Say Never Again, a case of retrocognition for me. I thought it was a hoot that he went on to do Johnny English.
And, by the way, by no means is “Moonraker” an “early” Bond film.
Sylvester Stallone shows up as a thug in Woody Allen’s Bananas. He was unknown then, but today you watch the film and everyone gasps when you get thatr unmistakable full-face shot of Stallone. He also shows up (with other familiar faces) in Mean Streets.
I was surprised to see Ted Danson playing the philanderer who gets drowned by betrayed husband Leslie Nielsen in Creepshow.
As a student in the UK in the mid-'80s, I used to watch The Young Ones on TV. One of the first episodes I ever saw was “Bambi,” in which the boys are on a university-challenge type quiz show against some students from a posh school.
Seeing it again a few years later, I was astonished to recognize the posh students as Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, and Hugh Laurie.
In high school I quite liked True Romance - imagine my surprise on re-watching it to realize the guy who beats the living crap out of Patricia Arquette is James Gandolfini!
Zsofia. That’s a good one. felt the same way when I rewatched GOODFELLAS and realized Michael Imperioli "was Spider, the kid Joe Pesci shot.
You can’t trust him! He killed Mozart!