I recently watched Homicide: Life on the Streets for the first time, and it took me a bit to realize that it was Giancarlo Esposito playing the son of Lt. Al Giardello. He was much younger then, and seemed much less physically imposing. The cheezy moustache didn’t help.
For me, it’s Aaron Taylor-Johnson. I understand that in theory, the guys from Kick-Ass, Godzilla, Age of Ultron and Bullet Train are all the same actor, but looking at their faces, I’m just not buying it.
That guy is a proper chameleon.
Just watched Escape From Alcatraz and recognised one of the actors from somewhere but just couldn’t place him (no, not Clint). So on to IMDB I go… the character was ‘Butts’, Clint’s next door neighbour. Turns out it is actor Larry Hankin and I recognised him as the doughnut eating cop on the phone to Kevin’s mum in Home Alone. What I didn’t know/recognise him from was he was also Old Joe of scrapyard fame from Breaking Bad!
Oh and I also recognised the actor playing ‘Doc’, although a few seconds’ brain searching and I cracked that one… I didn’t know the actor’s name (Roberts Blossom), but I could place him; another Home Alone favourite, this time playing old man Marley, he of the notorious salt shovel.
And I was surprised that the warden was Longshanks himself from Braveheart.
He’ll always be “The guy who made Peg Bundy’s couch” to me.
Just had another one and it even was a Marvel related one again. I had no idea that was Sacha Baron Cohen playing Mephisto in Ironheart .
I watched Nosferatu the other day, so there’s another movie to add to the list of movies where I don’t recognize him.
And I always forget he’s English until I hear him talking as himself.
Maybe not 100% what the OP is looking for, but I’m doing a rewatch of The Sopranos, and in one episode, AJ and his friends break into their school to go swimming. It develops into vandalism when they smash the glass in the trophy case and throw a desk into the pool.
One of AJ’s friends is played by a teenage Lady Gaga.
I recently looked up Esposito’s movie appearances. One I didn’t remember was “Taps”, starring Timothy Hutton, George C. Scott, and a young Sean Penn and Tom Cruise.
He was the cadet who tried to fire up the gas/oil generator after the power was cut off.
I was watching a repeat of “Adam-12” the other night, and did a double-take when I saw that an actor playing a small role as a motorcycle gang member was Mickey Dolenz (of the Monkees). He fit right in.
What I didn’t realize till later was the the motorcycle gang leader was Edd Byrnes (Kookie from “77 Sunset Strip:”).
You might also add young John Lennon in the biopic Nowhere Boy.
I did not recognize this actor in She Rides Shotgun:
As this actor in Rocketman:
Along the same lines, I had no idea the actor who played Greg Hunt in The White Lotus was the same guy who played Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Gries). He looked totally different with hair. (Did he wear a wig in Napoleon Dynamite? It seems like if he’s bald now he would have been at least partly balding then.)
He also has a bit part in the first Men In Black as the van driver at the very beginning of the movie who is stopped by border patrol before Tommy Lee Jones and his partner intervene.
ETA: I just did a rewatch of Kindergarten Cop, and Angela Bassett plays a stewardess towards the beginning of the film.
While rummaging through IMDB looking for something else, I noticed that a well-known actor had Band of Brothers in his credits. So I went to the BoB listing and learned (it’s been a while since I had watched the series) that small parts had been played by the likes of Michael Fassbender, Simon Pegg, James McAvoy, Jimmy Fallon and even Tom Hardy.
Now I’m watching the show again mostly to catch these folks, largely before they were famous.
We’ve been watching old movies from the 60s lately. We watched Please Don’t Eat the Daisies with Doris Day and David Niven. In one scene, they’re in a restaurant. The waiter is Uncle Leo (Seinfeld). No, he didn’t say, “Jerrrrry!”.
Circa 2011, I watched If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, a 60s madcap ensemble comedy, on my mother’s recommendation.
Not long after, I watched the 4th Pirates of the Caribbean.
Shamefully unfamiliar with his work in the intervening 42 years, it took me the whole second movie to realize this handsome fellow from the first movie:
played Blackbeard:
Ian McShane was a tour de force in Deadwood. Worth a look if you have HBO Max.