A few days ago, I caught the movie What Lies Beneath on TV. I remember that when I first saw this movie years ago, the ending really took me by surprise. I never expected that Harrison Ford would turn out to be the bad guy.
What other movies play with our expectations in this way, and have a twist that works because we’re not used to thinking of a certain actor or actress in that way?
Marcel Marceau issuing the only spoken word in Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie.
Never saw the trailer huh?
I think the very best instance of using an actor’s reputation to play against type is Henry Fonda in “Once Upon a Time in the West” - who would have thought of Tom Joad as the very bad guy?
“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” also does this sort of thing, but not to the same degree.
I thought Burt Lancaster did a great job of playing against type in Seven Days in May, though I confess I’m not intimate with his other works, so it may not have been as against type as I think.
William B. Davis said that he had always been cast as father-types and teachers before he got cast as Cancer Man in The X-Files.
Not against type, but uber-action-save-the-day-with-a-knife-in-his-teeth-hero-guy Steven Seagal was killed off in the first act of Executive Decision.
Similarly, audiences must have been stunned when big starlet Janet Leigh’s character didn’t make it past the 20-minute mark of Psycho.
There was a funny episode of Bones that cast Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger) as a creepy high school janitor who’s into taxidermy, and who is ultimately revealed to be… not the murderer, and also a very caring and thoughtful guy. I guess it wasn’t exactly a twist, per se, so much as a huge nudge-and-wink in-joke. They went totally over the top with it, so that it was pretty obvious he wouldn’t be killer.
Just thought of one:
Neil Patrick Harris played a fictionalized version of himself as an out-of-control druggie/womanizer in the Harold & Kumar films - and the first film preceded his role on rHow I Met Your Mother, so he was largely subverting his Doogie Howser persona.
Clint Eastwood losing a fistfight in White Hunter, Black Heart.
Likewise is Samuel L. Jackson getting eaten by a shark relatively early on in that one shark movie he did.
I understand it was different for French audiences, but Sergi López, the guy playing the psycho commander in Pan’s Labyrinth has “Joe Spaniard” looks and was at the time known in Spain for his comedic work.
Watching him abuse and threaten people was like seeing that nice lady from the candy store laughing madly while wielding a blood-spattered chainsaw.
Most of these answers aren’t ‘twists’ at all. Just actors playing against type.
But I’ll go ahead and add Denzel in Training Day anyway.
Wanted
Morgan Freeman ends up being the main villain, which is a twist and plays against what we expect from him as an actor.
Barton Fink. John Goodman was cast specifically for his jovial reputation, and played that expected role. Then it turns out he’s really a serial killer, plus he’d let Fink believe that Fink had accidentally killed his lover in a drunken haze, and helped Fink hide the body.