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Actors/Actresses who never play the same character twice...

drew_hawk

drew_hawk

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Jan 16, 2016
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Figured I'd go oppo on the other thread. A few that come to mind:

-Daniel Day-Lewis
-Gary Oldman
-Christian Bale (in general/ excluding the Batman trilogy)
-Amy Adams
-Cate Blanchet
-Lakeith Stanfield
-Oscar Isaac
-Sean Penn
-Frances McDormand
 
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drew_hawk said:
Figured I'd go oppo on the other thread. A few that come to mind:

-Daniel Day-Lewis
-Gary Oldman
-Christian Bale (in general/ excluding the Batman trilogy)
-Amy Adams
-Cate Blanchet
-Lakeith Stanfield
-Oscar Isaac
-Sean Penn
-Frances McDormand
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Sean Penn? Isn’t he pretty much always the Spicoli character?

JK, but that was by far his best character ever.
 
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drew_hawk said:
Figured I'd go oppo on the other thread. A few that come to mind:

-Daniel Day-Lewis
-Gary Oldman
-Christian Bale (in general/ excluding the Batman trilogy)
-Amy Adams
-Cate Blanchet
-Lakeith Stanfield
-Oscar Isaac
-Sean Penn
-Frances McDormand
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Cate Blanchett, who was nominated for academy awards twice for playing Queen Elizabeth I, in movies 9 years apart. And played Galadriel in 6 different movies.

I think she’s the opposite of someone that never plays the same character twice. Great actress though.

Oldman, Bale, Adams, and Isaac have all played the same character in multiple movies too.

DDL is probably the best example. Although one could make a slight argument that Bill the Butcher and Daniel Plainview are similar characters. Not sure I’d agree with that, but they’re both over the top in eccentricity as bad guys.
 
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I think Russell Crowe is another who's played a tremendously wide variety of roles. He's been The Gladiator, a schizophrenic genius, a captain in the British Royal Navy, a boxer, starred in Les Miz, been Superman's dad, and a dude with the world's worst case of road rage. Hell, nowadays he's morphed into John Goodman.
 
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joelbc1 said:
Hanks has done a good job if not getting “type-casted” in his career.
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Which is amazing considering how many memorable films he's been in.

You know what I think it is though. . . with the exception of Toy Story (which is voice acting), Tom Hanks doesn't do many sequels.

Seriously I'm looking at his acting credits on Wikipedia and the only movies that I can find that are a sequel that he's acted in is Toy Story and the Da Vinci Code.

There was no Forest Gump 2. There was no Green Mile 2.
 
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SeaPA said:
I think Russell Crowe is another who's played a tremendously wide variety of roles. He's been The Gladiator, a schizophrenic genius, a captain in the British Royal Navy, a boxer, starred in Les Miz, been Superman's dad, and a dude with the world's worst case of road rage. Hell, nowadays he's morphed into John Goodman.
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tv show fighting GIF by South Park
 
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Herky T Hawk said:
Cate Blanchett, who was nominated for academy awards twice for playing Queen Elizabeth I, in movies 9 years apart. And played Galadriel in 6 different movies.

I think she’s the opposite of someone that never plays the same character twice. Great actress though.

Oldman, Bale, Adams, and Isaac have all played the same character in multiple movies too.

DDL is probably the best example. Although one could make a slight argument that Bill the Butcher and Daniel Plainview are similar characters. Not sure I’d agree with that, but they’re both over the top in eccentricity as bad guys.
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I think it has to do with an actor's range versus the literal sense of appearing in sequels. But I could be wrong.
 
Herky T Hawk said:
DDL is probably the best example. Although one could make a slight argument that Bill the Butcher and Daniel Plainview are similar characters. Not sure I’d agree with that, but they’re both over the top in eccentricity as bad guys.
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I agree you could make the case...not quite the same character, but sort of different versions of the same character maybe. I actually think his character in The Phantom Thread might be on the same continuum.

That said, if he's the best example for this question, it's more because the guy hasn't made that many movies. He's only made about 20 movies and I bet almost none of us have seen more than a dozen of them.

I think most of the actors named here are awesome, but I don't know that there are any who don't ever play very similar types. I feel like Amy Adams plays a LOT of similar plucky, cuter than she is hot, good girl characters. Cate Blanchett plays a lot of ice queen bitch types.
 
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SeaPA said:
Tom Hanks has been pretty versatile.
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Eh, not to me. To me he's pretty much always "what if Tom Hanks was an Astronaut? What if Tom Hanks was shipwrecked? What if Tom Hanks was a congressman?

In a career as long as he's had, there are certainly exceptions, but I feel like he very, very rarely disappears into a role. He's almost always the hero with decency and quiet dignity, and his attempts to steer out of that lane are (in my mind) largely unsuccessful.

I think early in his career he had more interesting and more diverse performances - say Big, A League of their Own, and Forrest Gump, and even his silly performances in comedies, that really showed quite a range. But I think post-Forrest Gump his performances mostly been variations on the same guy.

That said, I don't think that means he's a bad actor by any means, but he's more in line with greats like Jimmy Stewart or Clint Eastwood, that were excellent at playing characters within a given range.
 
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Old School actors- Spencer Tracy. He never really pigeonholed himself into being type cast plus he dated Kate Hepburn. Speaking of which, Hepburn was a hell of an actress in many different roles.
 
ICWestfan said:
Old School actors- Spencer Tracy. He never really pigeonholed himself into being type cast plus he dated Kate Hepburn. Speaking of which, Hepburn was a hell of an actress in many different roles.
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You don't think Hepburn played pretty much variations on the same character? She was awesome, but she seems like one of the most obvious examples of a "type".
 
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ICWestfan said:
Old School actors- Spencer Tracy. He never really pigeonholed himself into being type cast plus he dated Kate Hepburn. Speaking of which, Hepburn was a hell of an actress in many different roles.
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I always think of Spencer Tracy as someone who basically played the same character in most of his roles. Guess everybody has different views. Hepburn and Tracy may have been a "beard" thing for Hepburn who is said to have been gay.
 
Nole Lou said:
You don't think Hepburn played pretty much variations on the same character? She was awesome, but she seems like one of the most obvious examples of a "type".
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I suppose you could say that but when you are in so many movies over such a long period of time you may get some overlap in character type. She was extremely versatile and was nominated for 12 Oscars of which she won 4.
 
Mister_Man said:
I think the list starts and ends with Gary Oldman. His range is incredible.

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I've always been impressed by his ability to play in elaborate costume/makeup. He rarely has the same face or appearance for 2 different movies.

As much as I like Tom Hanks. . . Tom Hanks looks like Tom Hanks in every movie. He rarely even changes his hair style, much less wears elaborate costumes/makeup. Even Woody and the Polar Express guy where he just did voice acting look like Tom Hanks.

You could watch 5 Gary Oldman flicks and if you didn't look at the credits you might not realize it was all the same guy.
 
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Hoosierhawkeye said:
I've always been impressed by his ability to play in elaborate costume/makeup. He rarely has the same face or appearance for 2 different movies.

As much as I like Tom Hanks. . . Tom Hanks looks like Tom Hanks in every movie. He rarely even changes his hair style, much less wears elaborate costumes/makeup. Even Woody and the Polar Express guy where he just did voice acting look like Tom Hanks.

You could watch 5 Gary Oldman flicks and if you didn't look at the credits you might not realize it was all the same guy.
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What's odd is the photo collage excludes his role from JFK - it is as if he was born to play Lee Harvey Oswald.

GVuRHLaWEAAYoFT
 
ICWestfan said:
I suppose you could say that but when you are in so many movies over such a long period of time you may get some overlap in character type. She was extremely versatile and was nominated for 12 Oscars of which she won 4.
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I don't know. She talked the same extremely distinctive way in every movie. She seemed to play the same type of smart, strong willed, proto-feminist female over and over. Although she also had ditzy screwball comedy in her too.

I don't think it's any knock on her, but it's almost impossible to find any movie star in the 1930s-1950s that isn't that way, because the entire Hollywood system was set up on the "star system" that by design was casting people like Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, etc etc in the same type of roles over and over. Nobody in those days was taking on the variety of performances we come to associate with great acting from the 1970s on. They were all pretty much doing what they were famous for, and that's not a knock on their talent, they wouldn't have been allowed to do anything different if they tried.

My guess is that we could probably find some better examples in that era from second and third tier actors that weren't big enough stars to always play to type. I'm thinking of someone like Joseph Cotten maybe?
 
I'll throw Jodie Foster for consideration, although admittedly that's another actor with an extremely distinctive voice and syntax that she carries from movie to movie, which cuts against what we're talking about here a little bit.
 
Mister_Man said:
Thoughts on Cristian Bale? His commitment to physical transformations (for a role) is at a very high level. I would say yes. Can play someone like Bruce Wayne to a drug-addicted loser.

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Great actor, and he is definitely good in different physical appearances, but his basic Christian Bale-ness does seem to string through many of his roles to me. I thought he was really good going against his usual thing in The Fighter.
 
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