Maybe you can even the score by watching old episodes of The West Wing - Sidle played a Secret Service agent on several episodes of that show.
Oh! I have one! Re-watching an episode of Buffy (“Go Fish”) I realized that one of the swim team members was Wentworth Miller from “Prison Break.”
How about Teri Hatcher as a background crewwoman who gets it on with the “rogue” swashbuckler, Okana?
I just gave my sister an Aha! moment when I pointed out that Stanley Kamel, who play’s Adrian’s therapist on Monk also appeared in the Star Trek:TNG first season episode Where No One Has Gone Before.
Actually, in watching the first two seasons of Monk on DVD, I seem to be noticing a lot of one-episode actors who also appeared in ST:TNG (or DS9 or Voyager).
I recently saw the very first episode of Buffy again. If you don’t remember it opens with two people breaking into the high school. The guy thinks he is there for a little hanky panky. The girl turns out to be the vampire Darla. This time when I saw it I thought "Hey thats the guy from CSI:NY. He didn’t last long.
Just saw Meet the Robinsons with my boys. The voice of the (future) mom sounded really, really familiar, but I couldn’t place it. With the help of IMDB.com, I found out that she also did the voice of Mira Nova in the animated Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, which my boys also used to watch a lot.
Great voice. Funny, wholesome, girl-next-door but sexy.
I was watching the Roy Campanella biopic It’s Good to Be Alive (1974). After Campanella’s accident, the guy who runs out and finds the wreck is seen very dark (it’s at night), and mostly only in profile.
I said, “Hey! That’s Uncle Leo!” [Len Lesser] Sure enough. He was even listed in the credits for that briefest of walk-on scenes.
Len Lesser is everywhere and my kids are sick of me calling out, “It’s Uncle Leo!” whenever I see him. He did a lot of Westerns, which may seem odd of such a solidly New York an actor, but Billy the Kid was from the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Adam Baldwin also was Ike in that campy '80s…er…camp flick Poison Ivy. I keep yelling “Ike!” whenever I see him in something.
My recent discovery of Firefly yielded a load of “hey, it’s that guy” moments - I’m ashamed to admit me and my friend were only able to place one of the people (“Hey, the sheriff is Mr Huntzberger of Gilmore Girls”) without consulting the IMDb.
However, we were rather amused to discover that we knew Carlos Jacott from the (potentially?) doomed Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. One “aha!” moment to bring sense to 17 wasted hours of our lives.
I thought Veronica Mars looked familiar.
But it took a while before I was able to connect her to the ill-fated “con-girl” in Deadwood.
(And the janitor in the Buffy episode “I Only Have Eyes for You” went on to start a hardware store in that same little hellhole in the Black Hills.)
Mentioned in a previous thread on this topic but still one of my favorites:
Satipo who met an early demise in Raiders of the Lost Ark (you throw me the idol, I throw you the whip)
is Doc Ock in Spiderman 2.
And Judy “Daisy” Cornwell was Mrs. Claus in Santa Claus: The Movie. In fact she has quite and impressive resume, including Dr. Who and Jane Eyre.
A couple of months ago I watched The Lost City, Andy Garcia’s film about the last days of a free Havana. Nestor Carbonell, who played brother Luis, looked awfully familar to me. I finally figured out that he played Luis on Suddenly Susan. It didn’t occur to me until much later that he also played Batmanuel on The Tick.
He is now on Lost in a small role. In case you didn’t know, that accent is fake. He was born in New York.
I was recently watching Clueless…“hey, that’s Turk” (Scrubs) and then “hey, that’s Billy” (Six Feet Under).
She has been on Law & Order a couple of times as Carla Lowenstein. In the original one, she was the submissive wife in a story based on the Joel Steinberg case. Great job.
Or Kirsten Dunst as L’Waxana’s dead child Hedril? Or Acevedo from The Shield as a crewman in the episode where Lore and the Borg join forces?
By name, the very accomplished British actor Alfred Molina. That was my jaw drop moment, when I recognized him on a recent reviewing of Raiders. I had no idea that was him until I saw the name in the credits.
Just had another one today.
Over the weekend Kevin Costner’s Waterworld was on TV. I was watching the tough little girl who was stuck on the boat with Costner and thinking
“Hmmm, this movie came out in the mid 90s. I wonder whatever happened to her?”
So I look her up on IMDB and find out it’s none other than Tina Majorino (Deb from Napoleon Dynamite).
I haven’t seen either of those movies in a while but I can totally picture it.
She did a great job as a little girl in **Corrina Corrina ** too.