Except his one speech was necessary. The main guy is grumbling about how his girlfriend’s parents are forcing them to take a thirty-day break. Cruise’s character ambles up and says, “When I was ten years old, I started a fire, and instead of getting in trouble, I was a hero!” That influences the main guy to start a fire on the GF’s family’s front porch, and presumably win her/them back. Of course it goes horribly wrong…
(That’s also a different setup than in the novel the movie is based on. In that, he wasn’t thinking about heroics; he just wanted the family to leave the house and face him. But the movie dialogue had to spell out a reason for him to set the fire, other than the fact that he was unstable.)
I was watching The Expanse for the first time for a while back, and there’s a spy in a few episodes named Kenzo played by Elias Toufexis.
“Where the f do I know this guy from?” It was killing me. As it turns out, he voiced Adam Jensen in the Deus Ex “prequels”–Human Revolution and Mankind Divided. His voice is unmistakable.
I was aware of the Weir connection. But it was just a week ago that I learned the artist for Cheshire Crossing (the book version) was Sarah Andersen, who also does Sarah’s Scribbles. I’ve read Fangs so I was aware she did artwork different than the style she uses in her webcomic but I didn’t recognize her as the artist in Cheshire Crossing.
This is the one I was coming to post. I didn’t realize that was Gary Oldman until days later when a friend mentioned it. In fairness, though, that was back in 1993 before most of Oldman’s body of work we know and love today. At the time I only really knew him from Dracula and State of Grace. Plus maybe JFK. I think I had also seen Sid and Nancy, but wouldn’t have known or associated him with that.
True Romance was so long ago that it was not only before The Fifth Element, it even predated Leon (The Professional)!
Long after I watched The Witcher I realized Queen Calanthe was played by the same woman who played the younger sister in Last of the Mohicans. (Jodhi May)
In the criminally underviewed The Nice Guys, there’s a scene where Holland March (Ryan Gosling) falls down a hill, ends up against a tree, and discovers that there’s a dead body also leaning against the same tree. In a “blink and you miss it” cameo, that body is played by Robert Downey, Jr. He’s in mostly profile, has no dialogue at any point in the film, and he has dried blood on his face, but it’s him.
I made it all the way through the HBO series Togetherness without realizing that the scheming rival mom Anna was played by the same actress as Jenny from The League. (Katie Aselton, who’s married to Mark Duplass, the male lead on both shows.)
I had never even heard of this movie until we found it on streaming last year. It was one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a long time. I have no idea why this wasn’t more popular.
I notice this kind of thing all the time. IMDb has made it much easier in recent decades, but I still try to do it by memory if I can. A few that come to mind:
A few years ago I saw the classic Outer Limits episode “Demon with a Glass Hand”. robert Culp is instantly recognizable, but I wondered if the actress who played Consuela ever did anything else, so I looked her up on IMDb. Did she ever. Arlene Martel did guest roles on dozens of shows back in the 60s and 70s (sometimes credited as Tasha Martel). She was Spock’s fiance on Star Trek, and I’ve seen her in I Dream of Jeannie, The Rockford Files, Banacek, The Love Boat, and probably others. I always wonder if it’s a compliment to actor to tell them that you’ve seen them for years and never recognized them.
In a recent thread about The ood, the Bad, and the Ugly, someone was surprised to discover that Tuco was played by (one of) the same actor as Mr. Freeze on Batman; the brilliant Eli Wallach. I’ve seen him in other parts and I have to remind myself that it’s the same guy. He could disappear into a role.
One other that I remember was watching Breaking Away a while ago. The townie kids have a couple run ins with some frat bros from the local college, and one of them look familiar. Took me a while, but I figure it out on my own; he was Ellis, the asshole in Die Hard who pretends to be John’s friend and gets shot by Hans. The actor’s name is Hart bochner.
Another Robert Culp episode of “Outer Limits” had aliens who looked like rocks and then were able to take over the body of a human who touched them. His wife/girlfriend in that episode was played by Salome Jens. I recognized the name from Star Trek: DS9 - she’s the female “Founder” leading the invasion of the Alpha quadrant. But if I hadn’t seen her name in the credits I would have never recognized her, since they had her under a lot of alien makeup in DS9.
I didn’t realize until years later that the guide who goes with Indy to retrieve the idol in the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark was played by Alfred Molina, but that’s only because it was his very first role.
Watching Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning to prep for this weekend, there was one lady in the NSA briefing. Damn she looked familiar and I could even picture in my mind what her other character looked like. An hour later I yell out “Oberon Martell’s wife!”
You never get a look at his face, but the guy who shows Indy, Willie, and Short Round to the airplane so they can leave China at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is Dan Aykroyd.