I Am Not Spock

RIP Spock
2230-2015

"How many times have I told you not to call me 'Urkel'?! My name is Jaleel White! Urkel was a character I played when I was a child!"

— Jaleel White (played by himself), Big Fat Liar

One of the most severe forms of typecasting, in which an actor or actress is not only defined as a certain character archetype, but in a specific role.

This is most certainly a double-edged sword, as it often guarantees that the performer will be famous for some time to come, but on the other hand, that role may end up stifling the performer's future acting prospects, as he or she may get rejected for other roles that may be seen as being against type. This can be tough on actors who, as artists, may have a strong desire to move on. As viewers and historians, it can sometimes be difficult to tell the difference between an actor who lucked out by getting one iconic role, and an actor whose career was hampered by an over-association with it.

Typecasting may have been more common in the early days of television as a holdover from motion pictures. It was common in the 1930s and '40s for a movie actor who was not a leading man or lady to make a career out of playing the same type of character. This seems to disproportionately happen to actors from sci-fi and fantasy works, possibly because some casting agencies may feel their credibility as a "serious" actor has been hurt by working on such shows.

For extra bad luck, the character may have a catchphrase the actor will be asked to repeat incessantly, or even worse be a Phrase Catcher and have to endure hearing it yelled at them by every Loony Fan.

Named for the 1975 autobiography by none other than Leonard Nimoy. An autobiography that, incidentally, didn't actually say what everyone thought it said because of the title.

See also …But I Play One on TV and One Hit Wonder: Acting. Compare Adam Westing and Never Live It Down. Contrast I Am Not Leonard Nimoy. And see Contractual Purity for those trapped in kids' show wholesomeness. Finally, see Role Association for the Just for Fun version. Not to be confused with I Am Not Shazam. For the writer equivalent, see Author Usurpation.

Remember that Examples Are Not Recent when adding examples here.

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Example subpages:

• Films — Live-Action
• Live-Action TV
• Multiple Media

Other examples:

Real Life:

Anime & Manga

• It's generally agreed within the anime fandom that Rie Kugimiya will be always be associated with Tsundere characters (particularly flat-chested little girls who are very sensitive about it). So much so that most of her non-tsundere roles have long been forgotten, including Al. Apparently, this could be J.C. Staff's part.
• It doesn't matter how long his career goes on and what roles he plays, Shūichi Ikeda will forever be Char Aznable to fans all over the world. Unlike many examples though, Ikeda actually revels in this, having said that "Gundam has been very kind to me" and that he'll gladly return to play Char in any project (be it anime or video games) for the rest of his life. He's even had a bit of fun with it by playing Char Expies in other Gundam shows, such as Gilbert Durandal in SEED Destiny and Full Frontal in Unicorn.
• Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Mari Iijima has certainly forever been labelled as Lynn Minmay, and for a while resented ever playing the character, since it meant that people would come to her concerts just to hear Minmay's songs, not her songs. This is said to be a major reason why she quit voice acting and focused entirely on her singing career. Fortunately, some decades later, she has come to terms with Minmay, and agreed to reprise her role for the English dub of Macross (she had been living the US for some time and could speak reasonably good, if accented, English) in part as a way of reconciling herself with the character.
• Veteran Italian voice actress Elisabetta Spinelli has voiced a great deal of major characters, often protagonists, in many Italian anime dubs in The '90s, but grown-up 90s kids will forever hear Sailor Moon speaking whenever she's talking. She has embraced her legacy and remembers very fondly her role as Bunny over twenty years later.
• Veronica Taylor, a.k.a. Ash Ketchum, has apparently had a hard time getting other work and seems rather bitter about it all. At a panel, she said something along the lines of "Being 'the voice of Ash Ketchum' is a great party trick, but it's never gotten me a job." Still, she doesn't hold it against the character, and Ash is still one of her favorite roles.

Films — Animated

• Auli'i Cravalho has been in various feature films and TV Shows including other works made by Disney despite that she is best known for being the voice of Disney's Moana.
• Irene Bedard is a Golden Globe nominated actress and has had a couple of notable mainstream roles like Smoke Signals. However she is best known for being the voice of Disney's Pocahontas. She doesn't seem to mind however, comparing it to being Santa Claus.
• Jodi Benson has been in many things over the years, but to most of the world, she will always, always be Ariel. She loves it, adores meeting her fans, has voiced the character in just about every Disney project she appears in, and has always said that she will never get tired of singing "Part of Your World" because the memory of recording that song is so special to her.
• Following Disney Princess tradition, Paige O'Hara was an accomplished Broadway performer (playing lead roles in Show Boat and South Pacific) before being cast as Belle in Beauty and the Beast. That is the role with which she is associated most and, although she retired from voicing Belle in the Disney Princess merchandising (due to her voice changing so much over the years), she still returned to voice her in Ralph Breaks the Internet.
• Although an accomplished opera singer, Mary Costa will always be best known as the voice of Princess Aurora in Sleeping Beauty. It's better remembered than her other roles, because naturally, opera is less mainstream than Disney films.

Music

• Latin rap One-Hit Wonder Gerardo Mejia will always be known by the same name as his one hit, "Rico Suave." This was reflected in his music video for "We Want the Funk", where funk musician George Clinton calls out to Gerardo, "Hey, you're that Rico Suave guy!", as well as Gerardo appearing in the mockumentary Pauly Shore Is Dead as Rico Suave. Despite all this evidence that Gerardo is happy with his reputation, however, one song on his second album was named "My Name Is Not Rico", very much mirroring the style of Leonard Nimoy.
• A tragic example is Denise Matthews, the pastor formerly known as Vanity, a pop singer infamous for her hedonism. After a near-fatal drug overdose in 1995, she gave up show business and the Vanity moniker and dedicated the rest of her life to evangelical Christianity, even refusing to collect the royalty payments from her previous albums and movies. Sadly she died relatively young in 2016 due to mounting health issues stemming from her OD, and worse, all the media headlines were "Vanity dead at 57", the exact kind of attention she DIDN'T want.

Professional Wrestling

• Terry Taylor, in his two-decade long career, hasn't been able to live down one infamous gimmick: the Red Rooster.
• Former TNA Tag Team champion Chris Harris. Despite his successful run with the company and as an indie circuit star, Harris is mostly remembered for his embarrassingly brief stint in WWE's revival of ECW as Braden Walker.

Radio

• Danny Matthews (well-known Oop North as a presenter on British station Key 103, but he's also worked for 105.4 Century FM, UTV's Wave 96.5, Imagine FM 104.9, Tower FM, as well as Bauer Media's 97.4 Rock FM, 96.9 Viking FM, Hallam FM and Magic AM, plus stints at Dune FM in Southport, and Capital Gold (now Gold) in Manchester, Heart in Cumbria and North Lancashire, yet if you mentioned his name people would see him as being known only for being on Key 103 overnights in the 1990s or being on 105.4 Century FM, depending on your interpretations. Ironically enough, he did return for a spell between 2004 - 2006.
• Dan Wood, invariably known for presenting on Viking FM and Radio Aire, despite doing a nationwide radio show on GCap Media's "One Network".
• Don Ameche and Frances Langford worked to avert this trope while doing The Bickersons on radio, since they did not want the audience to believe that they were in fact spiteful creatures who hated each other. They would step out of character at the end of episodes to reassure the audience that while their characters fought all the time, the actors were good friends.

Theatre

• Andrea McArdle as Annie, as well as most girls who played Annie on Broadway (except Sarah Jessica Parker). In fact, McArdle declined to be in the documentary Life After Tomorrow, chronicling many of the women who played orphan roles on Broadway. This ran the gamut from fairly well-adjusted women to actresses still in the business to women who just can't shake their association, and it's likely she declined because she fell into the latter. Sarah Jessica Parker didn't have a problem with it; neither did Kristin Vigard, The Pete Best of the musical.
• Paul Reubens as Pee-Wee Herman, which caused considerable problems when he was busted for indecent exposure in an adult movie theater. Note that Reubens brought much of the typecasting on himself with years of rarely, if ever, appearing out of character in public engagements (talk shows, interviews, etc.) and acting jobs after the general public became aware of Pee-Wee Herman; even his character in Cheech and Chong's Next Movie is a thinly-veiled Pee-Wee Expy. Even up to 2023, Reubens has been on social media such as Facebook and Twitter not as himself, but as Pee-Wee.
• An even more unfortunate example in the same vein is Andrew "Dice" Clay, due to his insistence on never breaking character and playing his stage persona in all public appearances, including one-on-one interviews. His career nosedived once his brand of vulgar Testosterone Poisoning fell out of favor, as audiences were unable to divorce the real Andrew Silverstein from the "Diceman" character he played for so long.
• Ted Neeley in Jesus Christ Superstar. He's still playing the role in stage productions, for crying out loud!
• The talented Norwegian actor Henki Kolstad had a long acting career behind him, starring in many Norwegian movies and stage productions for decades (among other things a memorable performance as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman in 1962) before he took the role as a gentle cobbler in a Christmas Calendar series in 1979. Kolstad, being 64 years of age at the time, did a wonderful performance, and never lived it down afterwards. To a generation of Norwegians (possibly two generations), he was "cobbler Andersen" and almost nothing else. He admitted that he had appreciated the role, but in his last years, he made it quite clear that it annoyed him a lot that this role was the only one that would give him lasting memory.
• David Suchet is to many the definitive Hercule Poirot. Suchet is often unrecognizable in public because he wore a hairpiece and a Fat Suit as the portly Belgian.
• Nathan Lane likes to tell the story about the premiere of Angels in America, a seven-hour long meditation on AIDS, homosexuality, America, Life and Death, and how he was at the after-party when he heard an extremely loud, extremely Scottish voice echo through the room: "THEY DIDN'T TELL US PUMBAA WAS GOING TO BE IN THIS SHOW!", a quick beat and then "SEE! I TOLD YOU IT WAS TIMON, NOT PUMBAA!"
• Soap Opera actors frequently run into this problem. Either A)rabid fans fail to separate them from the villainous characters some of them play—which has even lead to them being attacked in public, or B) they become so well known for playing one character that they fail to catch on as another.
• Michelle Nicastro was the original Eponine in Les Misérables and had a few other impressive stage appearances. But to a generation of 90s and 2000s kids, she's Princess Odette from The Swan Princess. Helped by how she was one of the few cast members from the first film to remain on board for the sequels.
• Lea Salonga achieved this uniquely for a stage role; she originated Kim in Miss Saigon and was so iconic in the role, she continued to reprise it over the years (the first run was when she was 17 and she kept playing it as late as her 30s). Especially surprising for someone who's managed to be the singing voice for two Disney Princesses (Jasmine from Aladdin and Mulan if you're curious).

Video Games

• To a minor degree, Rand Miller (co-founder and CEO of Cyan Worlds Inc.) is identified with his role as Atrus, which he played in all of the live-action Myst games. He's not even an actor; he's a game designer and programmer. For bonus points, he dislikes playing the role and only kept doing it for four games (the others use CGI characters) because he could not possibly have been switched out without a major discontinuity and fandom uproar.
• Michael Ironside recounts one time he was on a plane and a guy came up to him, immaculately dressed in a suit, and said, "Hey, you're Sam Fisher." Lost for a second his reply is, "No, I'm... wait a minute, yes I am."
• Charles Martinet will always proudly be known as the voice of Mario (and Luigi, Wario, and Waluigi)^note Even after he retired in 2023.. Oh, and one of the dragons in Skyrim.
• Merle Dandridge, the voice actress of Alyx Vance reports in the commentary saying that co-workers tend to peek out of the corridor when they hear her talk.
• Mass Effect: Some rare examples, though none of the actors particularly seem to mind.
  • Poor Brandon Keener will perhaps never escape the Typecasting from his voice acting role as the turian badass, Garrus Vakarian. He hasn't been in anything major ever since aside from a few commercials and a few guest movie/show appearances, but anything you come across that Keener shows up in in any shape or form will have, no doubt, been overrun by Garrus jokes. In addition, it doesn't help that Keener's actual real life voice sounds just like an in-game turian without the need of a voice-modulator. Seriously, just check out this link. It sounds like he's doing a Garrus line reading. The voice is what connects people to Garrus every time they hear Keener speak. Some Mass Effect fans even joke that it's actually Garrus that voice acts for Keener, because his voice is just that unique.
  • Seth Green gets some Typecasting due to his role as the Normandy's pilot, Joker, but because of how distinguished his acting career is compared to Keener's, it's a much rarer occurrence.
  • Jennifer Hale has gotten some of this for her portrayal of female Shepard, though her already-established career helps matters.^note She's had more video game roles than anyone else in the entire voice acting industry, save for Steve Blum.
  • Mark Meer, on the other hand, once made a convention appearance cosplaying as male Shepard. Make of that what you will.
  • Thanks to Mass Effect 2 and 3, Martin Sheen has become famous to a new generation of fans who know him as the Illusive Man.
• David Hayter has no shame of being known primarily for his role as the English voice of Solid Snake and the young Big Boss in the Metal Gear series, and is actually quite proud of the fact (despite his extensive screenwriting work; most famously the X-Men film trilogy). In fact, when Konami announced that they would be replacing him with Kiefer Sutherland as the voice of Snake in Metal Gear Solid V, Hayter wasn't too pleased, but would eventually return to Snake in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
• Have you ever tried looking for an Wikipedia article on Joseph D. Kucan? If you do so, you would be redirected to a page about a villain character he's most famous for^note which is Kane, of course, instead of a note about the actor himself. It's not just Wikipedia though, fans of Command & Conquer also refer to him by this name.
• Almost every actor who played a Grand Theft Auto protagonist suffers this, especially from Grand Theft Auto IV onwards as Rockstar Games started to use more obscure talent due to complications with Ray Liotta and Burt Reynolds after Grand Theft Auto: Vice City’s release.
  • One of the few PS2-era examples, Young Maylay will always be CJ.
  • Michael Hollick will always be Niko Bellic, despite landing roles in works such as Law & Order and Dying Light.
  • Scott Hill doesn’t have much of a career, if at all, outside of playing Johnny Klebitz in Grand Theft Auto IV, its episodes, and Grand Theft Auto V.
  • Likewise, Mario D’Leon is mostly known for playing Luis Lopez despite roles in other works such as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
  • Shawn “Solo” Fonteno, Ned Luke, and Steven Ogg are almost completely doomed to being referred to as Franklin, Michael, and Trevor, respectively. This has affected Ogg to the point where he expressed backlash to the character of Trevor on a Cameo request to re-enact him and declined to reprise the role for Grand Theft Auto Online in recent years. Solo and Ned on the other hand were quite grateful for their roles as it helped reinvigorate their acting careers and brought them to a larger audience, with them opining that Steven Ogg could have just mellowed out and realise how the game opened doors for his career and that fans do sincerely admire him for his character.

Web Videos

• James Rolfe is almost always referred to as The Angry Video Game Nerd, even though he has stated that the AVGN is not him, but a character.
• Channel Awesome:
  • Even after To Boldly Flee, some fans of The Nostalgia Critic have a hard time accepting that he's a fictional character and nothing like Doug Walker.
  • The same has been going for The Nostalgia Chick and Lindsay Ellis lately. The fans think that she really does treat Nella badly and that she really is a neurotic mess. Lindsay's even said that maybe she needs to go even more hyperbolic to hammer the differences in. This has died down since Lindsay has transitioned from the Nostalgia Chick to a more serious critic/video essayist.
• British actor Lawrence Russell got notability in 2020 for a series of Twitter comedy sketches, in which he portrayed an irritated casting assistant. Despite posting the sketches under his own name, he's remarked how many people forget that 'Mark from Casty Cast' is just his character's name.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • Jack DeSena will always be Sokka. That is, if you're too young to remember his time as Randy Quench: Volunteer Fireman and other characters.
  • Dante Basco, who played Zuko, barely escaped this. For 20 years he was Rufio (it didn't help that he looked and sounded the same age for over 20 years). Thanks to Homestuck's *ahem* memorable treatment, however, he's still Rufio among its fans.
  • Had Mae Whitman not landed Avatar, she almost certainly was doomed to be remembered as... "her?"
  • The Legend of Korra: David Faustino, like Dante Basco above, escaped this through Korra; until he became Mako, Faustino couldn't escape being Bud Bundy.
• Meagan Smith will always be remembered as Gwen Tennyson.
• Almost fifty years after it was made, Hanna-Barbera's Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines is still called by its working title, Stop that Pigeon. This was even lampshaded in an episode of Yogi's Treasure Hunt. And Paul Winchell will always be either Dick Dastardly, Tigger or Gargamel.
• Mel Blanc credited this as having saved his life. A near-fatal car accident left him in a coma for weeks, and everyone feared the worst. Then, one day, his doctor thought to ask him: "How are you today, Bugs Bunny?" Mel answered back in Bugs' voice and went on to have a full recovery.
• Steve Burns and Donovan Patton are always going to be Steve and Joe, respectively.
• A large part of the regular cast on The Simpsons had their previous career achievements be overshadowed by the famous sitcom.

In-Universe:

Advertising

• A commercial for Allstate Insurance features a group of people in the diner recognizing their spokesperson, Dennis Haysbert, but instead of referring to him by name, saying "That's safe drivers save 40%!"
• A 2006 Israeli McDonald's ad which had achieved memetic status called This Is Hell (actually, a textbook example of This Isn't Heaven) got a "sequel" in 2023. It starts with the old actor being offered the role in a new ad on the same subject, and him bemoaning how that old role is one he cannot escape. It then shows things like him trying to play Hamlet only to be interrupted by someone in the audience saying "McDonalds".

Anime & Manga

• Played for Laughs in act-age. Young actor Akira (the son of his casting agency's president) gets pretty annoyed when people − including the protagonist Kei − call him "Ultra Kamen", a character he plays in a kids' TV show.
• Skip Beat!
  • This is a major arc for Kyouko, when she gains some fame by playing the antagonistic Mio. She starts to get offers for roles in other productions, but all the roles are antagonistic and the directors even want her to 'just act like Mio', and she wants to reject all the offers because she doesn't want to be stuck doing one type of role. Kuu Hizuri sets her straight by saying that, since Mio was her first role that people know her acting as, of course she'll be asked to be like Mio because they have no other role to judge her on or compare her to. His words make her realize that each antagonistic role has its own way of acting, eventually leading to Kyouko to figure out ways to portray Natsu in Box R.
  • Chiori Amamiya had this problem as a child star. Her first role was that of Akari in The Scarlet Dice, and people were so amazed by it that they chose to hire her because she's 'the girl who played Akari'. Unlike Kyouko, though, she was unable to shed the stigma this left her with, to the point that she had to restart her acting career under a new name.

Films — Live-Action

• Galaxy Quest parodied the dilemma of the cast of Star Trek, where the entire cast of the in-universe sci-fi series is known for nothing else. One of them - Alexander Dane, playing the Spock Expy Dr. Lazarus - laments that he was a respected stage actor who'd earned acclaim starring in Richard III ("There were five curtain calls!") before he was cast in the series. Not only did several of the original Star Trek cast act in William Shakespeare before their Star Trek roles (including William Shatner and Patrick Stewart), but so did Alan Rickman, who plays Alexander Dane. And despite his hatred for the role, Dane is never seen without his make up on, even when he's at home by himself.
• In Idiocracy, Hormel Chavez, the Ow! My Balls! guy, appears to have the defined role of "the guy who gets hit in the balls", considering that during Joe's "rehabilitation", an audience member runs onto the field to give Hormel a kick from behind while he tried to sing the national anthem, to the applause of the crowd.
• In Man on the Moon, just like real life, Andy Kauffman gained a large audience from his role of Latka in the sitcom Taxi which he actually hates. This same audience quickly loses interest in him when realizing that he isn't the comedian they would expect.
• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Marvin says that this trope is why Rick Dalton, a faded Hollywood actor best known for his role of Jake Cahill in Western television series Bounty Law a decade earlier, keeps getting cast as villains in pilots for new shows: the audience doesn't see a hero defeating an villain, but instead a new, younger hero kicking Jake Cahill's ass. The television pilot that Rick stars in in the movie is intended to subvert this: while he's still cast as a villain, his looks are changed so that the audience won't recognize him, and Sam specifically says that he was cast because of his talents as an actor and not because he played Jake Cahill.
• In Soapdish, everyone in the dinner theater washed up soap actor Jeffrey Anderson is working at calls him "Mr. Loman", whom he plays.

Live-Action TV

• The Big Bang Theory:
  • Parodied in an episode where Sheldon meets James Earl Jones. Jones immediately realizes that Sheldon likely knows him as Darth Vader, and not any of the other roles he had throughout his lengthy career. Though it seems at first that he is annoyed by this attention, he quickly reveals that he too is a fan of Star Wars and does not mind that so many people immediately associate him with the franchise.
• Subverted in Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Jake gets Mario Lopez to appear at a party for Gina, since they both loved Saved by the Bell as kids. Jake spends the entire episode reminding himself to be cool and not overreact to meeting his childhood icon/mancrush. Then this exchange happens:
• Castle: The speculative fiction fandom homage episode "The Final Frontier" has actress Stephanie Frye, who played Lieutenant Chloe on the short-lived Space Opera Nebula 9. Beckett loved the show and cosplayed as Chloe in college, but Frye considers the role an Old Shame despite it being her Star-Making Role, and murdered her former co-star in an attempt to keep the show's revival from wrecking her non-Nebula 9 career. For her part, Beckett decides she can still like the character regardless of what she thinks of the actress.
• Curb Your Enthusiasm had a whole plotline in Season 2 where Larry tried to pitch a show about one of the actors from Seinfeld facing this, first with Jason Alexander, then with Julia Louis-Dreyfus. He fails with both attempts.
• Parodied in Extras with Shaun "Barry from Eastenders" Williamson (playing himself). Now an out-of-work actor (and the hapless Darren Lamb's only client besides Andy), he is resigned to the fact that he is only recognizable as his Eastenders character and will probably never get another decent part again. Most people even refer to him as Barry; when the name Shaun Williamson does crop up, his own agent doesn't recognise it.
• When Richard Wilson guest starred in Father Ted As Himself, he beat Ted up for using Victor Meldrew's catchphrase on him.
• In an episode of Frasier, Fraiser and Niles tries to bring a Shakespearian actor from their youth back from being Spocked in a sci fi show. It backfired, not because no one could divorce him from the role, but because he's a dreadful actor.
• In the first Thanksgiving episode of Friends, Joey does modeling for a stock photo company and ends up on a poster for STDs. His family then thinks he actually has one.
  • In the spinoff, Brent Spiner (who's best known as Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation) gets called Data by Michael. His agent just tells him to go with it. It's a bit of a Truth in Television parody as Spiner suffers from this in Real Life as well.
• Parodied in a MADtv Halloween Episode featuring Robert Englund (best known for playing Freddy Krueger), where everyone, much to his growing frustration, keeps referring to him as "that guy who played Willie in V (1983)".
• In an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, a martial arts instructor is famous for a series of action movies called The Dragon Killer. One scene has him arguing with his agent over the phone saying, "I just want to play the dad in the telephone commercial!" suggesting he suffers from this in-universe. For reference, the actor was Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat: The Movie, Adam Westing as an expy of himself.

Puppet Shows

• Satirical TV puppet show Spitting Image lampooned this with sketches where a post-Star Trek Leonard Nimoy is desperately auditioning for film and theater roles, trying to demonstrate he is something more than just a guy who played an emotionless alien with funny ears. His audition for the lead role in Hamlet does not go well at all.
  To be... or not to be. Is illogical, Captain... oh SHIT!

Radio

• A skit on John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme has Finnemore As Himself at a dinner party, where another guest has learned that he worked with Benedict Cumberbatch on Cabin Pressure and asks him "What's he really like?" And keeps asking until she gets the answer she wants, which is "He's a high-functioning sociopath who goes round London solving murders."

Webcomics

• In The End, this was what defined the career of actor Victor Smart. It's also another Star Trek parallel, as his most famous role was a starship captain.

Web Original

• The Nostalgia Critic invokes and plays this for laughs during his Sidekicks video, when the protagonist's Love Interest is played by Danica McKellar and he calls her Winnie. The Critic says he's sure the character has her own name, but it won't matter because they'll just see her as Winnie, anyway.
  • In his Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa review he uses this trope to refer to the fact that a rather prolific cast would be involved in a bad, low-budget movie, stating that the voice actors for Belle, Ariel, and Bart Simpson, a MADtv (1995) star, a former Power Ranger, and even Luke Skywalker were involved. With Grey DeLisle, he cites Azula, although unlike the other stars that role does not eclipse everything she’s ever done.

Western Animation

• Batman: The Animated Series:
  • Actress Mary Dahl, a.k.a. Baby Doll, suffers a genetic disorder which keeps her from growing, leaving her trapped in a child's body, and went insane because nobody would accept her as anything but the lovable, troublesome tot Baby Doll. She strove to establish a legitimate acting career outside of the Baby Doll role, including starring in a stage production of Macbeth, but it was largely panned and ignored. This echoes the real life case of Gary Coleman, who likewise suffered from a similar health condition and was typecast.
  • "Beware the Gray Ghost": Actor Simon Trent, a.k.a. The Gray Ghost, sank into poverty after typecasting kept him from getting other roles after the series ended. Things turned around for him after he helped Batman capture a criminal who was using an episode of the show as a template for a series of extortion bombings. Trent is voiced by Adam West, and the episode is a tribute to the 1960s Batman series.
• BoJack Horseman stars professional actor BoJack Horseman, who's only known as "the Horse from Horsin' Around", a painfully '90s sitcom about a horse that looks after some orphans. The third season reveals that in 2007 he attempted Playing Against Type as an "edgy" character whose Establishing Character Moment is a scene where he literally takes a dump on a VHS copy of Horsin' Around while shouting "wazzup, bitches!", but this was hugely unsuccessful and he regards it as an Old Shame.
• Celebrity Deathmatch: Michael Richards reacts angrily at being called "Kramer": "My name is Michael Richards, pal! Kramer is just the character I play on TV." (He of course says this in a perfectly Kramer-like cadence.)
• Family Guy:
  • In the episode "Brian Wallows and Peter's Swallows", Brian meets a reclusive singer who made a fortune singing advertising jingles. When she tried to branch out into opera, her debut performance of Carmen was ruined because the audience kept shouting at her to sing their favorite jingles instead.
  • Subverted in "Girl Internetted". Stewie and Brian end up buying a Hummer, and do donuts on Mark Ruffalo's lawn. They then proceed to tease him since he can't actually turn into the Hulk and do soemthing about it. Then Mark Ruffalo got angry... Turns out ol' Mark really was the Hulk, and Brian and Stewie got tossed clear up to New Hampshire.
• Pepper Ann has another Mark Hamill As Himself example. Milo lines up to get his autograph, but only because he confused him with Dorothy Hamill. As Mark Hamill tries to explain who he actually is, listing various roles he's played, someone in the back of the line screams that he was Luke Skywalker. Hamill immediately has security drag that fan away, then screams that he had that role twenty years ago, people, get over it.
• In a Robot Chicken sketch parodying Armageddon (1998), Harrison Ford complains that he doesn't want to go into space because he's just an actor, only for a fat nerd to shout "You go, Han Solo!" Later inverted in the same sketch, where Mark Hamill says he should have gone up to space because he "destroyed the Death Star", only for the very same nerd to tell him "That was just a movie, dude."
  • This wasn't the first time Hamill's done that - his appearance on The Muppet Show had him crash-land as Luke Skywalker, and insist on fetching his "cousin" Mark Hamill whenever he was asked to perform in a sketch.
  • Another episode had Billy Dee Williams get recognized in a grocery store checkout line. When he asks which of his many roles the customer preferred, the customer admits he only knows him as Lando Calrissian and starts criticizing him for betraying his best friend. Billy Dee exasperatedly defends Lando's actions (even into a second sketch later in the episode) without trying to separate himself from the character - and, reportedly, he will defend Lando's actions at length like this in real life if questioned about them too - so he's probably not too concerned with the confusion.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Mayored to the Mob", Mark Hamill, voiced by himself, gets quite annoyed by the fact that everyone wants to see him only as Luke Skywalker — even when he is playing a role in a work as far away from Star Wars as you can imagine, such as Guys and Dolls.
  • Parodied in the "Treehouse of Horror X" segment "Desperately Xeeking Xena", in which everyone who encountered Xena: Warrior Princess star Lucy Lawless addressed her as "Xena", much to her exasperation. Eventually, at the end of the segment when Bart and Lisa have rescued her from The Collector (Comic Book Guy as a nerdy supervillain), she offers to take them home — and so picks them up and begins to fly. "Xena can't fly!" Lisa exclaims. Lucy's response? "I told you, I'm not Xena. I'm Lucy Lawless."
  • Comic Book Guy is seen having three books on his shelf - “I Am Not Spock”, “I Am Spock” and “I Am Also Scotty”!
• Wreck-It Ralph: The entire plot of the movie would not happen if not for this trope. Because Ralph was quite literally designed to serve as the Big Bad antagonist of his game, over a 30-year "career", he grew to feel strangled by being pigeonholed as The Heavy and being ostracized and not at all treated nicely by the Nicelanders. Even game protagonist Fix-It Felix himself initially feels awkward interacting with Ralph though he's not as nasty as the others, allowing him to attend their game's 30th anniversary when he wasn't even invited originally. After a public outburst and being told to his face that he'll never amount to anything more than a Dumb Muscle human wrecking ball, Ralph has enough and escapes from his game world to try and prove that "the bad guy" doesn't always have to be a "bad" guy.

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