I’ve forgotten the term, but there is a term for the kind of actors who are associated with a television program, but not with a particular role, so one week they may play a police informant, one week a detective, and the next week the murder victim, etc.
One of my favorite examples of the amusing nature of this kind of thing ties into the fact that script ideas were often recycled in the early days of TV, when a sitcom might have 39 episodes in a season: There was an episode of the Andy Griffith show in which a gang of bank robbers pretend to be tv producers wanting to make a program about Andy TV or Not TV | Mayberry Wiki | Fandom
A few months later there was an episode in which real Hollywood producers want to make a program about Andy - and both episodes feature Gavin MacLeod as a producer or a fake producer.
I don’t think it was all that uncommon for actors to play multiple roles in the past, especially in long-running series. Each studio had casting directors who would know which actors were available for what, and they would offer them roles based on past experience. (Example: William Campbell was cast as Klingon Captain Koloth in Star Trek’s second season on the strength of his performance as Trelayne, the Squire of Gothos—another “dastardly gentleman”—in the first.) As a rule, of course, the actors were happy to take any parts they were offered, and it was nice to be in demand.
Watching episodes of shows like Mission: Impossible and the original Hawaii Five-O, it is remarkable how many actors turned up in different guest star roles in the same series at different times: Diana Muldaur, Loretta Swit, Mark Lenard, Nehemiah Persoff, Malachi Throne, Fritz Weaver, Milton Seltzer, Pernell Roberts, Logan Ramsey, to name a few. Some, like Swit, “got noticed” in this way and moved on to much bigger and better things.
When a series ran for five, six, seven, or more seasons, it was only natural for an actor to be called back many times. (How many actors got to play multiple roles on Gunsmoke? That show ran for 20 years!)
How often does this happen today? I really can’t say because I don’t watch many scripted dramas anymore. The last one I followed regularly was NCIS, and I haven’t seen an episode since Abby left.
It should also be remembered that the job of an actor is to act! They’re expected to be able to take on different roles as often as they change clothes. Some might get “type cast” because of their voice, physical appearance, theatrical training, comedic talents, and so on. But in general, being able and willing to play different roles is their bread and butter.
I think the practice of bringing back the same actor to play a different role was a lot less jarring 40 or 50 years ago than it seems to us now. Now we think of almost all TV shows as a serial narrative. Back then, each episode was considered as more of a complete performance/story. It was more like a stage production where an actor in a minor role might be promoted to a more significant one when another actor left. Nobody in the audience - even those who had seen the play before - would find that strange or disruptive to the story being told.
Hogan’s Heroes is an especially interesting case. Actors like Harold Gould and Noam Pitlik could be a Nazi in one episode and a Resistance fighter in another. (And pretty much all of the actors who played Nazis were Jewish.)
Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents were also notorious for having many actors playing different roles at different times. Perhaps the effect was less jarring because those were anthologies
I’ve tried coming up with other actresses who were notable for playing multiple guest roles in different series. So far, I’ve been able to think of Antoinette Bower, Marj Dusay, Joanne Linville, Barbara Babcock, Ruta Lee, and Arlene Martel. How many others were there, I wonder?
Those were the days when you could regularly say “Oh, that guy again!” when you were watching TV!
As a kid, it blew my mind that Charles Gray and Burt Kwouk were in multiple James Bond movies. Did they expect me to not notice that Blofeld looks exactly like Dikko Henderson from MI6?
For Law And Order, they were called “repeat offenders.” I don’t know if there is a generic term for all series that covers this sort of actor.
Dragnet was notorious for reusing the same supporting actors as fellow police officers or authority figures, with different names depending on the episode.
This describes TV shows of the past well. Go to any of the old dramas and you’re likely to see one actor playing multiple roles. Sometimes those roles were in just one season, the actor might be contracted for the season or just get called back as a known quantity, other times they might appear through the series.
As an example look at the IMDb full cast page for The Big Valley. Following the main characters are a number of actors with multiple parts like Harlan Warde who played 10 different characters in 11 episodes: Arthur Kleeber, Drake, Finletter, Jack Carpenter, Judd Fletcher, Judge Farnum, Judge Lansbury, Mr. Bickers, Mr. Carberry, Peter Doolin, and Will Oakley.
A notorious case was Barnaby Jones. The pilot episode was the trigger for the retired Barnaby to get back into the detective game after the death of his son, also a detective. The son is played by actor Robert Patten, who was not a particularly prominent actor. Meaning that he wasn’t going to be featured in the opening credits as one of the best stars, because he has smaller parts.
Patten has only one scene, his death scene, and it doesn’t feature Buddy Ebsen or Lee Meriweather. Patten is featured four other times in the series in unrelated roles. Guess nobody missed him that much!
Not only multiple roles, but L&O loves to give a guest role as a try out for future main cast members. No less a regular than Jerry Orbach showed up as a defense lawyer in his first appearance. Anna Parisse was a stripper, Courtney B Vance was a murderer (twice,I think), S. Epatha was a mother of murdered children.
IIRC, The Nero Wolfe mysteries used the same cast for every episode in different roles, like a theater repertory company.
Jennifer Esposito has an interesting background. One of her earliest roles was on a 1996 episode of Law & Order, another part on the show 10 years later in 2006, and since last year she has been a regular cast member of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
We could find some interesting results by sorting through all the actors who have played in any of the shows in the shows in the Law & Order universe.
Not a TV show, but a movie that took this notion and ran with it: Bedazzled. After each wish, the same circle of actors take different roles in the “new reality” segments.
