We watched “Interstellar” over the weekend. “Murph”, the daughter of Matthew McConaughey’s character, is portrayed by three different actresses: Mackenzie Foy as a young girl, Jessica Chastain as a young woman, and Ellen Burstyn as an old woman.
While it’s not unusual to have multiple actors play the same character over the course of a TV series or several movies, or sometimes two actors in a single movie (i.e. flashbacks to when a character was younger), I was wondering how rare it was to have three or more actors play the same character in a single movie.
In Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, Tony Shepard is played by four different actors: Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell. (Gilliam came up with the idea after Ledger unexpectedly died during production.)
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story had three different actors playing Al as a child, teen and adult. (Four if you count Diedrich Bader doing Al’s voice-over narration.)
David Prowse did the physical portrayal of Vader in his suit
James Earl Jones provided the voice
Sebastian Shaw was the face and voice of the unmasked Vader / Anakin Skywalker at the end of the film
In addition, in 2004, after Hayden Christensen was cast as the adult Anakin in Attack of the Clones, George Lucas re-edited the “celebration” scene at the end of Return of the Jedi, replacing Shaw as Anakin’s Force ghost with Christensen.
In the TV show Lost–the Man in Black(a.k.a. The Smoke Monster) was played by Ryan Bradford, Titus Welliver, and Terry O’Quinn plus numerous others he imitated
You may also notice that Vader stops looking so much taller than Luke when they start lightsabering in earnest, because that’s when they swap in Olympic fencer Bob Anderson. I mean, yeah, we presumably don’t want to open this up to every use of a stunt double, but there’s probably some amount of ‘wow, that’s a really long amount of time to be getting a clear look at the character doing what he’s known for’ that would qualify, right?
In the 1987 film Predator the title character was played in almost all scenes by Kevin Peter Hall and voiced by Peter Cullen.
However some of the special effects shots with the creature running the jungle were played Jean Claude van Damme who was the original choice to play the creature. (The directors eventually decided to replace the 5 foot 9 inch van Damme with the 7 foot 2inch Hall so it would more physically imposing playing against Arnold Schwarzenegger.)
Not a movie, but three different actresses portrayed Cher in the Broadway musical The Cher Show. There were a number of scenes in which two of the actresses were on the stage at the same time. I saw that show several years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Slumdog Millionaire. Jamal, his brother Salim, and Latika are each played by three different actors at three different ages. IIRC some of the child actors were recruited from the slums in India, there was a bit of controversy over it.
The TV series Dark had a character who was present as a boy (Claude Heinrich), an adult (Jakob Diehl), and an old man (Hans Diehl) all at the same time. They functioned as a single character.
Shrek the Musical is also a Broadway show. But there is a filmed version of a performance (actually edited together from multiple performances), so it also counts as a movie. Fiona is played at three different ages by Sutton Foster (adult Fiona), Marissa O’Donnell (teen Fiona), and Leah Greenhaus (young Fiona). The three of them even have a song together.