Have you looked up an actor on IMDB and discover he or she played another character you remember, but you’d never connect the two?
Tobin Bell, famous as “Jigsaw” in the Saw series of horror films, was in the straight-to-DVD sequel, Boogieman 2*. My wife asked me to confirm this, and I discovered that Bell, more than ten years before the first Saw movie, played “The Nordic Man” in the film version of The Firm.
A couple of years ago, I was looking up a favorite forgotten film of mine, My Bodyguard. It’s about a boy who is being bullied (by Matt Dillion, in a fantastic performance) and hires a kid with a reputation of being a psycho to be his bodyguard. I was surprised to discover that the bodyguard was played by Adam Baldwin (of Firefly. He was a big guy even when he was 18.
I also was surprised to discover that Camille Codori (Jackie Tyler in Doctor Who) had a role in Nuns on the Run.
I always suspected that Jimmy Buffett played a no-lines agent in Repo Man, but when I checked IMDB, I also saw that “Fingers Taylor” (Jimmy’s harmonica ace) also played “Another Blond Agent.” I wonder how they knew the director?
Happens all the time, esp with British actors for some reason. (I watch a lot of PBS/BBC/costume drama kind of stuff, but not exclusively.) Just tonight, for example … Watched Dangerous Beauty on Netflix Instant. I recognized the male lead instantly, but couldn’t place him, even though I saw his name in the opening credits. IMDB to the rescue … Rufus Sewell also played Alexander Hamilton in John Adams.
I’m good with faces, so it happens backwards for me.
For example, I noticed that the ignorant red-headed soldier who wipes his ass with Costner’s journal in Dances with Wolves also plays the psycho stalker in The Bodyguard. Then I go find their names on IMDb.
Somethingawful did a photoshop contest (maybe went gold? I think?) where they photoshopped one character from one movie into another, but it was the same actor. Some of those submissions were really “WTF? Really he was in THAT?”
After seeing Kevin Durand as “Keamy” on Lost, I looked him up on IMDB. The reason I did so is because I wanted to know what his ethnicity was. He looked like he was definitely part-Asian. On his IMDB page I saw that he had played the protagonist’s prison cell-mate in The Butterfly Effect, who was explicitly supposed to be Hispanic and who looked COMPLETELY different from Durand’s character on Lost. The latter looked like a white European with some Asian blood; the former, like a Mexican of at least 3/4 Mestizo heritage. I was astonished at this seeming racial transformation. I would never, ever, ever have recognized him. Did they change his eyes somehow to make him look more ethnic?
Here is a picture of him - he looks at least partially Asian or Hispanic, right?
We just started watching I-Spy starring Bill Cosby and Robert Culp. Great series, way before its time. Culp was very familiar, so I popped over to IMDB to see what else he’d done. Familiar, OK, familiar, never saw it, OK, waitasecond … Dr. Wallace Breen?! :eek:
I found one a while back that surprised me: Kenneth Colley. I looked him up because he played Admiral Piett, the subject of my favorite sub-plot in The Empire Strikes Back. And I saw that, the year before he played Piett, he played Jesus (!) in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
Just this morning, in looking up the details on Harold and Maude, which I saw for the first time this weekend, I discovered that (a) the director of Harold and Maude was also the director of Being There, one of my favorite movies of all time (I had been pretty sure of this already) and (b) the writer of Harold and Maude was also the writer of Silver Streak and Nine to Five, two more of my favorite movies of all time, which led to the real surprise that I had never connected: the same writer wrote Silver Streak and Nine to Five!
Kind of similar: I sometimes am looking over an old anthology of sci-fi stories, and find that I suddenly recognize the authors from elsewhere. Like yesterday (which pretty much inspired this post): “Robert Sawyer did the crash-landing-four-armed-alien-with-living-blood-that-displays-the-Pythagorean-theorem-to-communicate story? The same guy who wrote about parallel universe atheist neanderthals? Huh.”
Also, Robert Wise directed The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, and the first Star Trek movie. Which admittedly isn’t implausible, but they are pretty different kinds of films.
It was IMDB that pointed out that Fred from Roseanne (Jackie’s baby daddy) was also Danny Noonan in Caddyshack. You look now and it’s obvious that it’s the same guy, but I never put that together before.
Also, Jack Black was in Dead Man Walking. He was Sean Penn’s younger brother who came to the jail for a last visit before execution.
Guido the killer pimp from Risky Business is Ralphie from The Sopranos. That’s another that is obvious when you look now, but I didn’t connect them at first.
