I Am Not Spock / Multiple Media

• Haley Joel Osment (as a live-action actor) sees dead people, and (as a voice actor) swings a Keyblade around.
• Sean Marquette is always Mac, when he's not Spider-Man. Keith Ferguson is always Bloo, when he's not Basch/Garbranth, Marluxia, or fellow Craig McCracken character Lord Hater.
• Jon Heder will probably be best known for playing the title character in Napoleon Dynamite or a talking pickle for the rest of his life.
• Christy Carlson Romano is either Kim Possible, Yuffie, or Ren Stevens.
• Good luck finding a role from Minoru Shiraishi aside from himself or Taniguchi. Although starting in The New '10s, he's become known for Lowain and his otome CD roles, especially Utsuro.
• Michael Gross will either be gun nut Burt Gummer or Steven Keaton from Family Ties.
• Soleil Moon Frye will always be Punky Brewster. And she'll always have big boobs, even after getting a breast reduction. To the tweens, she's known as Jade or Zoey.
• Depending on who you ask, Stacy Keach is either Mike Hammer or Ken Titus.
  • Or Sergeant Stedanko.
• Peter Cullen, Optimus Prime. Unless you grew up with the Winnie the Pooh franchise, in which case he will always be Eeyore. For anyone who grew up in the late '90s and early '00s, he will also be remembered as the voice-over for many of Toonami's promos.
• Ricardo Montalbán will always be remembered for wearing a white suit and waiting for "ze plane" or as Khan. Or for his Chrysler's reeeeech Corinthian leather.
• Rick Moranis is either Bob McKenzie, Seymour Krelborn, or Wayne Szalinski. Others recognize him as Dark Helmet, while still more recognize him as Louis Tully.
• Voice actors in Spanish-speaking fandoms will always be remembered for their roles in famous series. Notable character roles in Mexico include:
  • Humberto Vélez: Homer Simpson. Made funnier when he became the first voice of Peter Griffin. Oddly enough, he even dubbed Fred Flintstone too in a TV special.
  • Patricia Acevedo: Sailor Moon or Lisa Simpson.
  • Jesús Barrero: Pegasus Seiya.
  • Francisco Colmenero: Pete, and he's still voicing the character, currently. Also, Santa Claus, Papa Smurf, Pumbaa, and countless narrations.
  • Esteban Siller: Gargamel. Brought up for laughs in an episode of Pokémon by...
  • José Antonio Macías: James.
  • Gabriel Ramos: Ash Ketchum. Even after temporarily moving to Argentina, he still managed to voice the character for a few more episodes, to the joy of many fans.
  • Cristina Hernández: Sakura Kinomoto.
  • Mario Castañeda: Bruce Willis and Jim Carrey are taken to another level when they speak with Goku's voice.
  • Arturo Mercado: Its either Shaggy Rogers, Scrooge McDuck, Simba or Yoda.
  • Víctor Ugarte: Harry Potter.
  • Alfonso Obregón Inclán: Shrek. Others also know him as Kakashi Hatake, Marty or Bugs Bunny.
  • Luis Alfonso Mendoza was indisputably Gohan. Others knew him as Sheldon Cooper, Count Duckula, Leonardo or another Bugs Bunny.
• Similarly, Portuguese voice actors suffer the same curse:
  • The most notable example would be the whole cast of Dragon Ball, all ten of them. Out of these, two stand out:
    • Henrique Feist, always the voice of Goku, but also the voice of Trunks and Kid Gohan.
    • Then there's the first voice of Vegeta^note  Also Piccolo/Coraçãozinho de Satã, but his voice was masked and distorted by computer, João Loy, with an interesting story. When he asked the director what voice he should use for this character he replied: "Just use your regular voice, he only appears for a few episodes and he's gone." This interview says it all.
  • Diogo Neto was also somewhat hit by this. When he started doing a show about Portuguese grammar people started asking "Why is Moses teaching me how to speak?"
  • Marthus Matias, the Brazilian voice of Fred Flintstone. A fellow dubber loves to tell the story of how hiring Matias backfired, as his distinctive voice and diction automatically turned the sheriff he was supposed to voice into Fred, making everyone else in the studio laugh profusely.
• Kevin Sorbo is Hercules. Even when he was on Andromeda, he was still Hercules IN SPACE!. This is another case where the actor doesn't seem to mind, since he also played Hercules for God of War III. He found it interesting to play a Hercules who was so different from his Hercules. He even happily promotes the fact that he's doing another bonus Hercules work, this time his retro skin from Smite. However, it seems that in recent years he's becoming more associated with his role as the Christian-hating college professor in God's Not Dead as it reflects his more recent desire to be a propagandist for the Christian Right.
• Sean Bean is generally associated with two roles (Boromir and Ned Stark) and one trope (Chronically Killed Actor).
  • In the UK, he was best known as Sharpe.
• Jim Varney was a classically-trained actor who'd been versed in the works of Shakespeare, but most people would probably only have recognized him if they heard him say these two words: "Hey Vern!" (or maybe Slinky Dog).
• John Ratzenberger is forever known as Cliff Clavin from Cheers or having at least one role in every Pixar movie up until Soul.
• David Bradley = Argus Filch and Walder Frey.
• Danny DeVito's identity depends on the age group. To those born in the late 60s-early 70s, he's Louie DePalma. Those born in the 1980s may see him as Harry Wormwood. Those born in the 1990s or later see him as Frank Reynolds or Philocetes. Alternatively, comic book fans regardless of generation see him as the Penguin.
• Depending on who you ask, Debi Derryberry is either Jimmy Neutron or Coco Bandicoot.
• Matthew Lillard is Shaggy Rogers for those who grew up with his portrayals of the character. It helps that he played the character in the live-action Scooby-Doo movies and took over as Shaggy's voice in the cartoons after Casey Kasem retired for good.
• "The Superman Curse" is a Hollywood urban legend which posits that actors playing Superman either are unable to get serious work after they stop playing the role, have horrible tragedies occur in their personal lives, or both. This also applies to other cast members of any adaptation.
  • Kirk Alyn failed to find work after his time as Superman because he was too closely identified with the role. As a result, he was relegated to voiceovers, commercials, and uncredited screen roles. He later made a Remake Cameo as Lois Lane's father in the 1978 Superman film. Alyn also had Alzheimer's disease later in his life.
  • Christopher Reeve, who first played the role in the 1978 movie, was just starting to escape his role as Superman. A new generation of moviegoers was just coming up and most of them hadn't seen the Superman movies. Then he got crippled in a horse-riding accident in 1995 and the newspapers can't say anything but "best known for his role as Superman".
  • Brandon Routh, who played the role in 2006's Superman Returns, hasn't really had a big career in movies since then, though most attribute this more to the middling reception the movie and his performance got. On the whole though, he hasn't been too badly affected by "the curse", as his career is still chugging along alright, with him getting roles in indie movies and TV shows. For fans of Chuck, Routh has become Daniel Shaw. He's also playing Ray Palmer/The Atom in Legends of Tomorrow. He later got to reprise the role of Superman in Crisis on Infinite Earths (2019).
  • Smallville hired a lot of actors who played roles in previous Superman adaptations, banking on their fame in fandom. All still living actors who played Superman at the beginning of the franchise have appeared in some form on the series. The Christopher Reeve movies' Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) and Jimmy Olsen (Marc McClure) also showed up. Annette O'Toole was hired for the role of Martha Kent (Superman's adoptive mother) without the producers remembering she had played Lana Lang (Superman's childhood girlfriend) in Superman III. Helen Slater, who played Supergirl in the spin-off movie, played Clark's Kryptonian birth mother Lara. Even Reeve himself showed up, as the Genius Cripple scientist Virgil Swann.
  • Unsurprisingly, Smallville's Clark, Tom Welling, has fallen victim to this, as his acting career has slowed down significantly since the show ended. He specifically asked not to become Superman during the series' span to escape it. It didn't work. Like Routh, he also got a chance to reprise the role in a cameo for Crisis. He's found a modest amount of success working behind the camera. More surprisingly, he isn't the worst example from the show: Allison Mack, who played Chloe Sullivan, has expressed on her blog that she had a much harder time escaping her most famous role than Welling has. It now seems unlikely she ever will, save with the addendum of "was also in a sex cult."
  • Dean Cain will always be the Superman of Lois & Clark, particularly after the cartoons and comic versions of the Man of Steel took on the big-muscle chested look he put into the role. He did go on to have various roles in shows such as Frasier and Law & Order, as well as made-for-TV movies. He has also made guest appearances in two other Superman-related series: one in an episode of Smallville as the villainous Dr. Curtis Knox, and a recurring role in Supergirl (2015) as the title character's foster father, Jeremiah Danvers. ABC News correspondent Buck Wolf once commented, "[Cain] has yet to find the right role."
  • George Reeves (who starred in The Adventures of Superman) also had problems in his career from being so closely identified with the role of Superman. On June 16, 1959, days before his wedding, Reeves was found dead from a gunshot wound in his head at his home with his Luger near him. His death was officially ruled a suicide, but controversy surrounds the ruling, as Reeves' fingerprints were never found on the gun, and he had an affair with the wife of MGM exec Eddie Mannix. It was Reeves' death that inspired the conspiracy theories and the urban legend of a curse associated with the Man of Steel.
  • Josh Hartnett cited this as the reason he turned down the role of Superman, as well as those of Batman and Spider-Man.
    "Spider-Man was something we talked about. Batman was another one. But I somehow knew those roles had potential to define me, and I didn't want that. I didn't want to be labeled as Superman for the rest of my career."
  • So far, Henry Cavill has averted this and is considered to be the only Superman actor to have substantially escaped "the curse" and not have his entire acting career be defined solely by the character, being equally known as Superman as he is for his roles in Mission: Impossible – Fallout, The Witcher (2019), and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.. He's even dismissed the idea altogether.
• Maile Flanagan is Naruto. Believe it! Well, that and Principal Perry.
• Patty Maloney is likely known only as Honk, Darla Hood or Tanis.
• John Leguizamo: As of recently, he's best known as Bruno Madrigal due to "We Don't Talk About Bruno" becoming a Sleeper Hit on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. Before that, he was best known as Sid the Sloth in the Ice Age series and Luigi in the live-action Super Mario Bros. (1993) movie, but, like Bruno, we don't talk about that.
• Kevin Conroy will be remembered forever for being the voice of Batman. Conroy adored the role and took every possible chance he could to voice Batman, so he is more of an aversion of this trope.

---