Dave Bautista (a similarly giant actor/former wrestler) seems to have a bit broader acting range.
In contrast, there’s only so much John Cena can do when you look like a giant GI Joe action figure (although I do enjoy his work).
Robin Williams had two characters he played, not just one. All of his zany roles were alike, and all of his serious roles were alike, but Zany Robin Williams was very different from Serious Robin Williams.
He was also a high-school nerd in the Jumanji movies. Which, from what I understand from interviews, is actually closer to his real personality.
Gary Oldman, though, I’m pretty sure that the SAG relaxed their requirements for unique names, and there are actually like five different talented actors all named “Gary Oldman”.
The first person I thought of was Clint Eastwood. Surprised he hasn’t been mentioned yet.
Adam Sandler in Punch Drunk Love and Uncut Gems shows he’s got a lot of range, he just chooses to have fun in a lot of roles.
DeNiro is fun in Stardust.
He probably stammered but he was uncharacteristically athletic (“ripped,” as they say) in The Fly, and I don’t think he had another role like it before or after.
His role in the semi-serious Moscow on the Hudson was unlike any of his others.
Robin Williams going against his comic type in Awakenings, as well. Both men were nominated for major Best Actor awards for this film (DeNiro for an Oscar, Williams for a Golden Globe).
This seems to me like almost the opposite of what the OP is asking for (“no matter what role they assume, they seem to be doing more or less the same character”). It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, but I remember thinking it’s what you get when you take a typical Adam Sandler character and put him into a very different sort of movie.
Whereas, many of Adam Sandler’s own movies are similar sorts of movies to one another, but the characters he plays in those movies vary more than you might think.
When I found out that Dwayne Johnson was cast to be Black Adam I was highly skeptical. Then I saw him play the villain in Doom. He was pretty good. A friend of mine who’s familiar with his wrestling career said he played a villain several times, which makes sense.
Oh yeah - he was a heel for most of his time in the WWE. IIRC, he was often Stone Cold Steve Austin’s nemesis.
That character wasn’t much different from his usual. Now, if you want Early-Sam-Jackson-Not-Like-Anything-Else-He-Did, how about Coming to America?
Well, here’s your chance to mention him. In what role did he not play his signature self?
Paint your Wagon?
You wanna see a whole lotta Connery you never seen before?
Check out Zardoz.
Rogert Ebert famously dumped on Sandler’s performances in review after review. For The Waterboy, he notably expressed the same sort of hope that I did in my OP:
Do I have something visceral against Adam Sandler? I hope not. I try to keep an open mind and approach every movie with high hopes. It would give me enormous satisfaction (and relief) to like him in a movie. But I suggest he is making a tactical error when he creates a character whose manner and voice has the effect of fingernails on a blackboard, and then expects us to hang in there for a whole movie.
Since I long ago stopped watching them, I don’t recall whether I disliked Sandler’s movies because he was playing the same character over and over again, or if it’s because in each movie he created a completely new character that happened to be inane and annoying in their own unique way. I rather suspect it’s the former—I seem to recall that every character of his was some variation of an ostensibly nice, if overly needy, man-child prone to outbursts of passive-aggressive hostility.
Ebert eventually did find a movie to praise Sandler in, the aforementioned Punch Drunk Love. Ebert’s review notes with approval that “Sandler reveals depths and tones we may have suspected but couldn’t bring into focus”, and that the film might “liberate Sandler for a new direction in his work… Who would have guessed he had such uncharted depths?”
That review still wasn’t enough to get me to watch Punch Drunk Love, or anything Sandler’s done since, with the exception of the Hotel Transylvania series. I had no idea that he voiced the main character until reading the credits, and was pretty impressed by this. Of course, it’s a bit of a cheat in that it’s an animated film, and the physical design of the character looks nothing like Sandler. But still, I’m usually pretty good at identifying “actors playing themselves” even in voice work.
This was the one that leapt to my mind too.
A very, very different role (and an excellent movie and role) from what we usually get from Jim Carrey.
I don’t know about that. Was Serious Robin Williams in Awakenings really the same character as Serious Robin Williams in One Hour Photo?
I was also thinking of Play Misty for Me.
Would the OP allow a career shift for an actor?
Leslie Nielsen was an actor who played stern characters then moved to comedy and succeeded well there. Kinda why the comedy worked…we didn’t expect that from him but it worked great.