In one episode of The Good Place, the four main characters are transformed into versions of Janet - all played by D’Arcy Carden, as Janet, as themselves.
Including a bit of “Eleanor Janet pretending to be Jason Janet.”
I’ve never seen this movie, but I remember thinking at the time that it’d be great if they did just that, i.e. imitating the other actor’s style.
I need to watch it now, I guess.
Yes, amazing acting in an excellent series.
One MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE episode (“The Play”) has Martin Landau’s master-of-disguise character Rollin Hand replace someone as usual, but this time he’s replacing stage actor Vitol Enzor, as played by Michael Tolan, in turn playing an Eastern European head of state who gets plenty of really good lines and is portrayed quite well, all told.
The gag is, when Tolan-as-Hand-as-Enzor-as-The-Premier does his rehearsed bit on stage for a functionary who’s calling the shots — and who, sitting up front, thinks this is going great — the team’s tech guy makes it so the real head of state, who’s farther back in the theater, hears slanderously unflattering lines by that actor: being read in sync with the performance that wouldn’t infuriate anyone, but as a second simultaneous performance to get the hammer brought down on whoever seems to be ordering these actors around.
Not quite the same, but Charlie Day as Charlie Kelly as Al Pacino as Serpico always makes me laugh.
Blackadder Goes Forth had Gabrielle Glaister as “Bob,” a woman who joins the army in disguise as a man and ends up performing in drag at a cabaret.
Bored to Death had Ted Danson as George Christopher singing “The Impossible Dream” in a Don Quixote costume…
To return to As You Like It, you forget that Shakespeare’s company had no women. So it was a boy actor playing Rosalind disguised as Ganymede imitating Rosalind.
He was a “dude playing a dude disguised as another dude”. He also didn’t drop character until the DVD commentary – literally. He did the DVD commentary as Kirk Lazarus playing Lincoln Osiris.
This is gold standard for multiple levels of acting as far as I’m concerned.
In the series “Dollhouse” Actor Enver Gjokaj has personality traits implanted into him and portrays versions of series regulars Topher Brink and Lawrence Dominic, the latter normally played by Reed Diamond, who has some pretty distinctive mannerisms. It’s a hoot.
Hugh Laurie pretending to be an American who is pretending to do an English accent, the accent he really has but can not use because it would sound too real for his character.
Enver also portrayed Eliza Dushku’s character Echo at one point - and quite well.
This. I had a friend who said it felt like the cast listed in the credits at the beginning of each episode was so small when it felt like there were so many more cast members.
Orphan Black pulls off what so many movies and shows can’t. It made me forget it was one actress and I just thought of each iteration of Maslany as its own character. They were so distinct.
The Steve Coogan / Rob Brydon series of movies - The Trip, and its sequels - often has them bantering at lunch, and often doing interpretations. Thus:
Real Coogan + Real Brydon play characters who are versions of themselves - Film Coogan and film Brydon.
When they do impersonations over meals they are sometimes impersonating real people but often doing actors in character.
There’s 18 of these so points for depth and breadth.
George Hamilton got nominated for Best Actor at the Golden Globes for ZORRO, THE GAY BLADE, in which he plays Don Diego de la Vega — no, not that one; the son of the guy who, as Zorro, fought injustice years before — and, for a little over half a minute, Hamilton also voices the narration of Diego Senior tasking Diego Junior with carrying on the family business.
And the joke the movie is built around is that Junior manages to successfully pass himself off as the original for maybe one day before getting injured on the job and needing his brother Ramon to put on a mask and pretend to be the same guy.
And so, in effect, it’s Hamilton as Ramon passing himself off as Diego Junior passing himself off as Diego Senior as Zorro — with Diego Junior now limited to pretending to pretend to be Zorro, by showing up in full costume (and thereby getting everyone’s full attention) before innocuously explaining that he was told to arrive so attired for a masquerade ball here and now (so his brother, now pretending to be his cousin, can more easily pull off a heist in drag while leaving a ‘Z’ calling card).
The British sitcom Stella Street has two impersonators (John Sessions and Phil Cornwell) doing a cast of dozens and it really gets confusing when they have 6 characters playing Monopoly, for instance.
There’s this bit from Stargate: SG1
