In Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Ben Affleck plays a role as Holden, one of his characters in Kevin Smith’s movies. He also plays himself later in the same movie, along with Matt Damon.
In the biopic The Doors, there’s a scene where Jim Morrison (played by Val Kilmer) and Patricia Kennealy (played by Kathleen Quinlan) get handfasted in a pagan ceremony. The priestess who performs the rite is played by the real Patricia Kennealy, who uses the name Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, continuing to claim that her handfasting to Morrison was a valid wedding and that she is his only wife.
Would Stan Lee’s various cameos in movies based on comics he (co)created count?
The movie also had John Densmore in a cameo role. He played the studio engineer.
and 1998 Billy Idol played early 1980s Billy Idol.
Almost Famous: Jann Wenner, portrayed by Eion Bailey, had a cameo as a taxi passenger.
Private Parts: Howard Stern’s wife Alison, played by Mary McCormack, has a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo as a very blurry switchboard operator.
Homicide: Life on the Street: Gary D’Addario, the person on whom Lt. Giarradello was based, had a cameo as a motorcycle-riding undercover cop.
Portlandia: Kyle MacLaghlan plays the mayor of Portland; the actual mayor plays one of his assistants.
In* Secretariat*, Diane Lane plays Secretariat’s owner Penny Chenery, while Penny Chenery plays a spectator at the Belmont Stakes. (For some reason IMDB has her at the wrong race.) The closing credits take great pains to point out her cameo.
Schindler’s List ended with several real-life listees, including the Jewish girl Schindler had kissed.
A League of Their Own ended with some of the real-life players who’d been portrayed by the younger actresses (plus Geena Davis and Lori Petty in old age makeup) at the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Seinfeld playing himself in his tv show within his tv show where he played himself in that season where they pitched an episode to NBC for the show that he’d been doing for NBC for like 5 seasons has to factor into this discussion somewhere. Very meta.
That reminds me of Martin Scorsese playing one of Travis Bickle’s passengers in Taxi Driver.
Actually, this is not correct. Old Dotty was played by Lynn Cartwright and Old Kit was played by Kathleen Butler. Davis and Petty did dub the voices, though.
Three.
First, in the 1970s Superman: The Movie Lois Lane’s parents - seen on a train when the teenage Clark Kent outruns it - are Kirk Alyn and Noel Neill who played Superman and Lois in the original movie serials. Neill would go on to play Lois in the George Reeves TV show.
Also, in Superman Returns - which I liked, dammit - Noel Neill gets some screen time as the elderly woman Luthor cons out of her fortune. And the TV series Jimmy Olsen - played by Jack Larson - has a cameo as a bartender.
Peter Benchley - author of Jaws - plays a television reporter doing a live shot about the shark attacks at Amity.
In Thor, J. Michael Straczynski (who wrote the Thor comic book for several years, and worked on the script for the movie) plays the guy who finds the hammer Mjolnir stuck in the center of the crater in the New Mexico desert.
Later in the same movie, Walt Simonson (who was the writer and artist of the Thor book for a number of years) appears in the feast scene at the end of the film.
I seem to recall both of them guest starring in an episode of Lois and Clark as well, and not just as cameos.
Christopher Reeve was on SMALLVILLE as a Stephen-Hawking-type genius, the only man on the planet who could answer who-am-I-and-why-am-I-here questions from young Clark Kent in full-on passing-the-torch mode.
This is stretching the limits of meta-casting, since it’s strictly print, not film/video, but. . .
Edwin Lester Arnold’s novel “Lt. Gulliver Jones,” which along with his other novel “Phra, the Phoenecian,” may well have been the inspiration for Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Barsoom” series and the character John Carter, respectively. “Jones” had been out of print for half a century, and basically forgotten, although “Phra” had been in and out of print at various times.
In the early 1970s, Marvel Comics serialized the novel in their “Creatures on the Loose” series. They actually did a very good job of fleshing out a short novel in which very little actually happens, and, IMO, the comic series was a much more fun *read. In the novel, basically all that happens is a) man from Mars riding a flying carpet crash lands on earth, dying in the process, b) Gulliver Jones hops on the flying carpet, which takes him back to Mars, c) some rather uneventful adventures, d) flying carpet reappears to rescue him from certain death and takes him back to Earth.
In the novel, the unnamed Martian dies at the scene. In the comic, he is changed to a dying, wise, old man, named “Lu-Pov.” He has specifically sought out the bravest warrior of all time [somewhat similar to Abin Sur/Hal Jordan], to help fight the evil Ar-Hap on Mars. That person is Gulliver Jones. The novel “Phra” had no connection to “Jones,” but the comic writers did write in a character named “Phra.”
And the connection to the thread title? “Jones” had been out of print for over half a century before it was rediscovered by a sci-fi writer, who was instrumental in getting the story republished. As a tip of the hat to the discoverer, the writers the dying Martian, unnamed in the original novel, “Lu-Pov.” The writer who re-discpvered Arnold’s book? Richard Lupoff.