I’ve been watching the TV show The Book Group on Hulu. It’s a British comedy, set and filmed in Glasgow, Scotland. One of the actors portrays an American.
I’m watching the first episode and suddenly I realize I’ve seen that actor before. It was Anne Dudek – “Cutthroat Bitch” from House. I never would have expected to see her there (the show was produced before she went on House, and her character clearly is similar in both shows).
It was similar to the appearance of Sylvester Stallone in Bananas. The first time I saw the film, it was when it first came out, and Stallone meant nothing. When I saw it years later, I was shocked at the familiar face.
I wonder where other people have had a similar experience. Not a cameo or stunt casting, but an actor that you recognize showing up somewhere when you never expected it.
I was watching Rawhide a few weeks ago and recognized Peter Lorre. Yes, that Peter Lorre, of “The Maltese Falcon” and “Casablanca” fame. It was a 1960 episode titled, “Incident of the Slavemaster.” Lorre was about the last actor I would have expected to go strolling through the crowd in a popular American television drama.
A lot of people would be surprised to see George Clooney in the old TV show The Facts of Life. I remember when his career first started taking off and he had become well-known, I said to a friend that I recognized him from TFoL. My friend was like “no way, you’re crazy!” and I’m like “O RLY?”
So there I was in a hotel room in Chennai, India, and I was dead tired and flicking through channels for an English or Hindi movie, and up pops this total cheesefest of a teen-heartthrob-spy-thriller (I kid you not) starring Alex Pettyfer as the blond high-school James Bond Jr. who has to save the world or some shit like that.
So there I am staring with glazed eyes while the blond boy bimbo is sent off to some deep-cover rendezvous in an electronics store. In accordance with his instructions, he asks a question about one of the computers and gets a snarky put-down from the dorky-looking chubby nerd in a staff T-shirt…
… who happens to be Stephen Fry.
Of course, the dorky “store clerk” is actually the chief of Top-Secret Cool Spy Gadgets for the Secret Service, and he’s really there to hand over to our teenage hero a whole mess of implausibly complicated electronic equipment in the secret depths of a stockroom.
Fry has a perfect three-minute cameo as a brilliant socially maladjusted technology nerd, and AFAIK we never see him in the movie again after that.
While he’s not an actor in the traditional sense, Colonel Sanders (yes, that Colonel Sanders) makes a strange little cameo in an exploitation movie about Nazi bikes called Hell’s Bloody Devils. The main characters are eating in a Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the Colonel just walks up, watches them eat for several seconds and starts talking about how wonderful the chicken is.
No, really. (Warning: Youtube link of 40 second clip from the film. The clip contains possibly NSFW shot of a woman in underwear for a few seconds before cutting to KFC.)
One of my favorite shows ever was an Australian comedy called The Games. Sam Neill shows up as a guest star in one episode. This wasn’t a before-they-were-famous thing either; it was five years after Jurassic Park. He and the creator of The Games, John Clarke, are friends from their days in New Zealand.
One of the odd quirks in The Games is that (almost) all the characters had the same names as the actors who played them. Neill plays the CEO of an American consulting firm, but I don’t know if the character’s name is ever mentioned.
Stephen Colbert plays the perp in some episode of… Law & Order, I think. (Could be CSI but I don’t think so.) I happened to catch the episode in a re-run and nearly did a spit-take at my TV.
I saw that too. Also the guy in the wheelchair I recognized as the dumb supermarket employee from Hot Fuzz. Yarp. Hot Fuzz also has Belloq from Raiders Of The Lost Ark, playing the evil priest.
A recent one for me was seeing Oscar from The Office as Edward Norton’s house gate booth security guard in The Italian Job.
Dr. House and Arthur Weasley (Hugh Laurie and Mark Williams) were the two inept criminals hired by Cruella DeVil (Glenn Close) in the 1996 version of 101 Dalmatians
I can’t believe I didn’t recognize Dan O’Herlihy as Grig, Alex Rogan’s reptilian navigator, in The Last Starfighter.
I saw both The Last Starfighter and Robocop in the theatres, and watched and re-watched Robocop many times over the years hence, and it wasn’t until I watched the 25th anniversary edition of The Last Starfighter that I realized under all the creature effects that Grig was OCP’s Old Man.
I’ve been working my way through NYPD Blue on Amazon, and was surprised to see Academy Award winner Octavia Spencer in a brief scene. She played a sassy travel agent who quizzes a cop about joining the police force. Checking IMDB, I’m surprised that I’m not more used to seeing her, since she has appeared on ER, Chicago Hope, The X-Files, Just Shoot Me, Malcolm in the Middle, Dharma & Greg, CSI, CSI: NY, Medium, and The Big Bang Theory among others.
Richard Dreyfuss in a bit part in The Graduate several years before he became well known. Seeing it the second time around, he seemed suited to the part as a little shit disturber.
In a different vein, as I watched Marathon Man in the theatre when it first came out, I marveled at the performance by the actor playing Szell, the evil ex-Nazi. At the end, I stayed to see the closing credits and had a head slapping moment. I had seen Laurence Olivier a few years before in Sleuth as well as in a couple of his classic film roles when he was younger, but he had melted into his role in Marathon Man to the point where he was unrecognizable, to me anyway.