Playing Against Type / Film Acting

Actors Playing Against Type.

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• Anne Hathaway had to break away from her association with Nice Girl characters in films like the Princess Diaries duet.
  • Havoc and Brokeback Mountain were examples, but she came so far that when she hosted Saturday Night Live in October 2008, she spoofed Mary Poppins in a skit that reveals what "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" means - it's not pretty...
  • Rachel Getting Married, where she plays a recovering drug addict and a thorough pain in the ass, seems to be a deliberate choice "against the type" as well. She got an Oscar nomination for Best Actress out of it.
  • The White Queen in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010) remake, distributed by Disney. Her character is sort of a creepy version of her earlier innocent characters.
  • Pretty well cemented in Love & Other Drugs which included several explicit sex scenes.
  • And she played Catwoman and Fantine of Les Miserables. She was very serious for her latter role where she lost 25 pounds and has her hair cut short on screen and this earned her a Golden Globe, a BAFTA and an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
  • In The Witches (2020), she plays a villainous role, The Grand High Witch, the leader of a group of witches who want to rid the world of children.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger made a pretty large side-career out of lampooning his action hero type casting in movies such as Twins (1988), Kindergarten Cop, Junior and Jingle All the Way.
• No Name on the Bullet is a rare time where Memetic Badass Audie Murphy plays a creepy villain.
• Brad Pitt got typecast in his early career as handsome, charming characters. Kalifornia subverts this, playing a scruffy, drawling serial killer. In 12 Monkeys, he plays a manic weirdo with a lazy eye. After this film, his typecasting was generally discarded, so audiences are no longer surprised to see him play a variety of roles.
• Bruce Willis has played against type on a few occasions, to the point that his "type" completely changed. Before Die Hard, Willis was a comedic actor known for his wisecracking role in Moonlighting. His appearance in such a big-budget actioner was met with a great deal of initial skepticism, but its success turned him into a bona fide action star. Willis went against his new action star type with a role in Death Becomes Her, in which he played a weak-willed and neurotic doctor. As he has aged, his type has broadened to include characters from a wide range of backgrounds, from daffy to dour, weak to badass. Willis also did the same in the erotic thriller Color of Night, where he played a psychologist haunted by the suicide of a patient, and who has a love affair with a mysterious young girl.
• Cary Elwes did this when cast as the villain in Ella Enchanted, especially after being the hero of The Princess Bride and Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
• Cheng Peipei was best-known for her heroic roles in Wu Xia films in the sixties and seventies before her notable performance as Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
• Christopher Walken:
  • He played way against type in the musical version of the movie Hairspray, wherein he portrayed milquetoast gag peddler Wilbur Turnblad. He even did a Fred-and-Gingeresque song and dance with his loving wife, ably played by John Travolta. Ironically, Walken's dancing gained a fair amount of fame in the 90's due to SNL sketches and a Fatboy Slim video.
  • And let's not forget his role as Puss in the live-action musical adventure "Puss in Boots" from 1988. Probably because of his strong typecasting, most people don't know he spent most of his college career as a dancer in musicals.
• Clancy Brown is best known for playing the brutal and authoritarian prison guard Captain Hadley in The Shawshank Redemption, and many other roles in that vein such as Sergeant Zim in Starship Troopers. In The Hurricane, he again plays a prison guard, but his character is far more reasonable, and eventually comes to believe in Hurricane Carter's innocence.
  • And even before then, when he was already known for villainous roles (such as The Kurgan in Highlander), his turn in Blue Steel as a gruff yet kindhearted NYPD detective stood out.
• Colin Firth was saddled with his roles as soft, slightly foppish, romantic types from Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones' Diary before becoming a suave spy on Kingsman: The Secret Service. He even did his own stunts.
• French comedian and actor Coluche, who had only played comedic/goofy roles on the big screen before (such as in The Wing or the Thigh and Inspector Blunder), played an alcoholic and depressed gas station attendant who sets out to avenge the death of his young misfit friend in 1983's Tchao Pantin. The French equivalent of the trope is often called "Faire son Tchao Pantin" since then.
• French-Greek director Costa-Gavras likes to ask actors who tend to work mostly in comedies to play in his serious films sometimes. That has happened with José Garcia in 2005's The Axe and Gad Elmaleh in 2013's Le Capital, for instance.
• Dick Van Dyke:
  • In Night at the Museum, Van Dyke played the Big Bad!
  • In Dick Tracy, Van Dyke played a corrupt D.A. in cahoots with Big Boy Caprice's mob, as a victim of extortion.
• Elijah Wood, after numerous child roles and the heroic Frodo, seems to have concentrated on playing weirdos to shuck his wholesome image:
  • As the cannibalistic Serial Killer Kevin in Sin City.
  • His character in Maniac seems to make the above's Kevin look tame by comparison.
  • To a lesser degree, his character in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Not a cannibal serial killer, but stealing an unconscious woman's underwear and seducing her with her own erased memories aren't the activities of a man of sterling character.
  • And to add to that, the low-budget British film Green Street has him as a rebellious American college dropout introduced to the world of hooliganism.
  • In Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency he plays a shiftless and kind of scummy loser/washed up Garage Band musician who makes an effective Foil for the heroic and upbeat title character he becomes an unwitting sidekick to.
• Frank Sinatra played against type in The Manchurian Candidate, where he wasn't asked to sing a note. It established him as an actor not just a singer. Also his turn in Suddenly, where he plays a psychotic would-be presidential assassin.
• Gérard Darmon: Malthazard in Arthur and the Invisibles was quite a departure from his previous comedic roles. While he played a villain in the comedy Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra (Criminalis), Malthazard is a way more serious kind of foe.
• Henry Fonda was often typecast as straight-laced, heroic characters. However...
  • Once Upon a Time in the West, Sergio Leone's second-to-last spaghetti western, features Fonda as a child-murdering psychopath. Fonda initially didn't want to be in the movie, due mostly to the script's muddled attempts to describe a highly visual film, but changed his mind when Mr. Leone gave him this description of his introductory scene: "Picture this: the camera shows a gunman from the waist down pulling his gun and shooting a running child. The camera tilts up to the gunman's face and... it's Henry Fonda."
  • An earlier marked departure from his usual type was in Fort Apache as the unsympathetic martinet Colonel Thursday. He was also the antagonist of Firecreek, but that character's a sympathetic Anti-Villain.
  • Advise & Consent, arguably. His character, a nominee for Secretary of State with controversial political views, isn't very sympathetic. But then, pretty much no one in the movie is.
• Hugh Grant is mostly known as the male lead of romantic comedies. In The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015) he gets a chance to play a villain who turns out to be The Mole for the MI6. This movie's director, Guy Ritchie, seems to like casting Grant against his type as Grant would play a corrupt detective in The Gentlemen and an arms dealer and gangster boss in Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre.
• Jack Douglas played a variant of his "Alf Ippititimus" character in all his Carry On apperances, barring Carry On Emmannuelle, wherein he played his role completely straight.
• Jackie Gleason as the redneck Sheriff Buford T. Justice in Smokey and the Bandit.
• Jamel Debbouze, a renowned French-Moroccan comedian, played a major role in French war drama Indigènes (released in the US as Days of Glory), even getting several crowners throughout the film. In the same film, Samy Nacéri, virtually unrecognisable from his better known role in the action comedy franchise Taxi.
• Jane Seymour (Actress):
  • She is often known for playing sweet, sympathetic roles, yet she played the mean, but comical governess Fraulein Rottenmeier in the 1993 TV adaptation of Heidi.
  • And let's not forget her as Linda Crandell, a black widow-esque seductress in the USA Network film released that same year, Preying Mathis.
• Jeff Bridges, while a talented actor, usually has the part of the Nice Guy in movies, and age never really stopped that. There are, however, exceptions:
  • Jagged Edge, in which Glenn Close defends him on a charge of savagely murdering his wife, although her investigator Robert Loggia is convinced he's guilty. He's acquitted, but it turns out he did do it - and in the climax tries (and fails) to kill her.
  • He's the villain of Iron Man. Part of what makes the reveal in this movie especially shocking is that he is still playing a nice guy! Though, this turns into Faux Affably Evil in the end.
  • He also plays the part of Clu in TRON: Legacy, who is a fascist program version of Kevin Flynn, who he was also playing, but this one stands out more.
  • He is also the villain in the American remake of The Vanishing.
• Jennifer Aniston
  • The Good Girl has her taking the lead role as a young woman trapped in a dreary, depressing life in a small Texas town. Her attempts to escape the crushing tedium result in terrible consequences with which she must live. Critics refer to it as Aniston's finest hour.
  • She also plays a cynical stripper in We're the Millers.
  • She even tries her hand at villainy as one of the titular Horrible Bosses. In this film she constantly harasses her employee (played by Charlie Day), and eventually gives him an ultimatum: either he fucks her, or she'll fire him and tell his girlfriend that he harassed her.
  • In Cake (2014) she plays a depressed chronic pain sufferer who has hallucinations about her dead friend.
• Jessica Lange, normally so sweet and honest, plays an absolutely monstrous character in Julie Taymor's version of Titus. Her equally evil and far creepier sons are played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Matthew Rhys, both of whom are normally cast as nice guys, Rhys in particular. Perhaps the greatest example of Playing Against Type in the film, however, is when Anthony Hopkins bakes both of them into a pie and doesn't eat any himself. Jessica Lange also took a turn as the highly controlling, dominating Evil Matriarch in Hush.
• Joan Sims was mostly known for playing nagging shrews, Cockney lasses, or upper-class ladies, a far cry from the butch Russian Captain she plays in Doctor in Trouble.
• John Cena is well-known as a white-meat good guy and All-American Face. In F9: The Fast Saga, he plays Jacob Toretto, an assassin and master thief who happens to be Vin Diesel's evil little brother.
• Julie Andrews:
  • This is a plot point in S.O.B., in which an actress with a sugary-sweet reputation is asked to show her breasts in a soft-core film. Andrews took the role after Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music typecast her. This was one of several films her husband Blake Edwards directed her in that broke her out of this mold in various ways. (Others included Darling Lili, 10 (1979), and Victor/Victoria.)
  • Her role in The Americanization of Emily featured her as sexually active and America-hating. Further, her roles in Darling Lili and Star had her character perform a striptease onstage! Its assumed Star and its eye raising adults only status was the basis of the film S.O.B..
  • A different example of this is in the live-action Eloise movies, where she plays Nanny, a high-strung and over tired old woman who can't sing or dance. Rather a change from Maria and Mary Poppins.
  • She also plays Gru's emotionally abusive Jerkass mother in the Despicable Me films.
  • Andrews also voices a Lovecraftian sea kaiju in Aquaman.
• Kay Francis was almost always cast for light-hearted comedies, soap operas, and melodramas. The reason for that is that she possessed a unique chic yet elegant air. The only exceptions are four drama films, including Mandalay.
• In A Few Good Men, doing this revived Kevin Bacon's career - prior to this, he was only known for playing pretty boy teen hearthrobs, such as his lead role in Footloose.
• Kurt Russell in Grindhouse: Death Proof has his typical charm, in spite of being a serial killer, though the twist that he's a real wimp when it comes to actual physical confrontation is against type.
• Wilford Brimley was so frequently cast as gruff but lovable grandfather figures (e.g. Cocoon, The Hotel New Hampshire,The Stone Boy, Star Wars: Ewok Adventures) that it was strange to see him play a villainous role as the corrupt and amoral head of security in The Firm.
• Macaulay Culkin was so sick of being associated with Kevin of Home Alone and that damn cheek-slapping "AAAUGH!!!" that he decided to play a psychopathic boy who murdered his brother, shoots a dog for no reason, and tries to murder his cousin in The Good Son. It didn't quite work. As an adult, he played a Hollywood Atheist in Saved! as well as Michael Alig, the controversial Club Kids founder who was convicted of manslaughter in Party Monster.
• Speaking of Kingsman, Mark Strong played villains who betray England in Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Robin Hood (2010), and a villain-in-waiting about to betray the Green Lantern Corps in Green Lantern (2011), so when he turned out to be a totally trustworthy, loyal agent in Kingsman: The Secret Service it was a bit of a shock. Especially since the equivalent character in the comic the movie was based on was a traitor.
• Mary Tyler Moore:
  • Played a manipulative mother who plotted with her son to murder a rich old woman in the TV movie Like Mother Like Son: The Strange Story of Sante and Kenny Kimes. Also, she played a somewhat sympathetic Evil Matriarch in Ordinary People.
  • Also opposite one-time TV husband Dick Van Dyke in The Gin Game on PBS.
• Paul Ford, a comedic actor known at the time almost exclusively for playing blustery buffoons plays one of the few sympathetic characters in Advise & Consent, the loyal and hard-working Majority Whip.
• Sergio Leone also liked to use Italian actors atypically.
  • Aldo Giuffre, better known as a comedian than an actor, is the Union Captain in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
  • Romolo Valli, comic relief in several Visconti films, plays the tragic revolutionary Villega in Duck, You Sucker!.
  • Gabriele Ferzetti playing a serious role in Once Upon a Time in the West is less against-type, but seeing the star of L'Avventura in a Western still feels odd.
• Peter Falk is always a nice, quiet gentleman on screen - always kind and humorous, sometimes a bit rumpled and messy, very often a cop who combines all of the above... Always - except, of course, for his turn in Murder, Inc., where he rapes, murders, assaults, robs, and threatens half of the cast, playing vicious mob killer Abraham Reles. Falk also played a Villain Protagonist Expy of Fidel Castro in The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "The Mirror" and a mob boss in Robin and the 7 Hoods.
• Intruder in the Dust: Porter Hall, whose Wikipedia page describes him as being best-known for his "villains or comedic incompetent characters," plays Nub Gowrie, a menacing yet honorable hillbilly who displays powerful grief and determination in the aftermath of his favorite son's murder.
• Robert Englund played both bumbling-but-harmless Willie in the original V and supernatural psycho Freddy Krueger in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. The latter seems to have caused Englund to now be typecast as horror-film weirdos and psychos.
  • After Nightmare, Englund would occasionally be cast in horror movies that had him play non-villainous roles. For instance, in Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon his character is a heroic Expy of Dr. Samuel Loomis who is trying to stop the title killer, while in Wishmaster he's a friendly (if overly materialistic) collector of antique art.
• Richard Boone was known for his cowboy and officer roles in Western series and films, particularly the gentlemanly and cultured gunslinger Paladin in Have Gun – Will Travel. The burly and gruff medieval warrior Bors in The War Lord is quite far from that.
• Robert De Niro has made a career for the past ten or more years out of subverting, parodying, or deconstructing the tough-guy cred he had accumulated over a long and illustrious career. Examples include Analyze This and Stardust.
• Rodney Dangerfield, best known as a boorish underdog who gets no respect, played an abusive father in Natural Born Killers. Even though he retained much of his trademark schtick, it's still a little jarring to watch—although given the Laugh Track in the scene, the jarring nature of Dangerfield's presence was probably intentional.
• After breaking out in Pulp Fiction, Samuel L. Jackson got typecast as street-smart angry black men and powerful men of authority. In Kingsman: The Secret Service he plays a nerdy, goofy computer programmer who is nauseated by violence and has a hilarious lisp.
• Ty Burrell is best known as the lovable Cloudcuckoolander dad Phil Dunphy on Modern Family. In The Skeleton Twins, he portrays Rich, the former teacher of Milo (Bill Hader). During the course of the movie, we find out Rich had sex with Milo when Milo was his 15-year-old student.
• On the subject of I, Claudius, Lucius Sejanus, bastard extraordinaire, as played by... Captain Picard?
  • Captain Picard WITH HAIR!
  • And Patrick Stewart is a well-respected classical actor — at the time he took the role of Picard, that was seen as playing against type.
  • Or try Patrick Stewart as the flaaaaaaaamingly Camp Gay interior decorator Sterling in Jeffrey, which came out about a year after The Next Generation ended. He made the line "We're the Pink Panthers!" as convincing as his "I will make them PAY!!!" rant in First Contact. And he looked adorable in a pink beret and short shorts.
    • That wasn't even the only time, he was also a charmingly gay theatre director in Frasier who was in love with the title character himself. "Is there anything this man can't do?"
  • Don't forget his appearance as Karla, the head of Moscow Centre, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and the sequel.
    • A part he played memorably without actually saying anything. Now that's great acting!
  • There's also the time where he voiced Napoleon in Animal Farm (1999). It's... hard to imagine him as an absolutely ruthless and irredeemable dictator, to say the very least.
  • And check him out in the BBC's 2010 telecast of Macbeth. It would be hard-pressing to see him give any darker performance for any darker a role.
  • L.A. Story as the evil French Maitre'D.
    Carlo: Is this part of the New Cruelty.
    Maitre'D: I'm afraid it is.
  • And then, as if he was specifically trying to one-up this list, he played the leader of a gang of murderous neo-Nazi skinheads, spitting out vile racials slurs, in Green Room.
• Robin Williams branched out from his straight slapstick routine to regularly appear in serious, Tear Jerker roles such as Dead Poets Society, Good Will Hunting, and What Dreams May Come, after initially breaking into drama as a complicated Soviet defector musician in Moscow on the Hudson. He then began to mix in far darker roles such as in One Hour Photo, Insomnia, and, to a lesser degree, August Rush.
• Jim Carrey broke through with a string of wildly over-the-top comedic characters. Even staying within his niche, he upset audience expectations with The Cable Guy by playing a humorously disturbed villain rather than a whimsical buffoon. Eventually he got Tom Hanks Syndrome and went after critical respect with a number of serio-comic roles such as The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and a few serious dramas such as The Majestic.
  • A Christmas Carol (2009) does a great job of highlighting both Carrey's comedic and dramatic strong points. Carrey takes Scrooge very seriously, and it doesn't come off as a caricature. Scrooge comes off as Dickens intended: a stingy curmudgeon.
  • In The Number 23, he plays a guy (a dad, no less) that is actually a psychotic killer who wrote a book about himself being obsessed with the number 23.
  • And in Kick-Ass 2, where he plays Colonel Stars and Stripes, an ex-mob enforcer (with a Brooklyn accent) turned born-again Christian.
• Kate Winslet:
  • In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, she played the more "wacky" Carrey-like character, and turns out to be a deconstruction of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
  • She also played the main villain in Divergent, despite being primarily known for playing romantic leads. She also tends to do a lot of period pieces, so a movie set in a dystopian future seems out of place for her. According to her, she took the role partially because she wanted to do something drastically different.
• In The Evil Dead (1981), Bruce Campbell's character is a Final Guy who screams a lot and spends surprising amount of time getting caught under bookcases. Ironically, it's the same character that took over his career, meaning that he ended up typecast as a character who started out as the exact opposite of his normal reputation.
• Tom Hanks was well-known for playing sly, comedic characters in '80s comedies. And then came a little film called Philadelphia, and another film called Forrest Gump. Since then he became better known for playing upstanding men of integrity in such films as Saving Private Ryan, The Green Mile and Catch Me If You Can. He subverted this new reputation with Road to Perdition, in which he played a mob hitman (though still a pretty sympathetic one).
  • While the film overall wasn't too well-received, he broke out of both types at once when he played the powerful CEO of a sprawling, Facebook-like corporation in The Circle (2017) and mixed heartfelt charisma with manipulative cunning to create a sleazy bastard you still really wanted to like.
  • Although on the surface it looks like it should be right in his wheelhouse as a romantic comedy co-starring Meg Ryan, You've Got Mail was criticized for casting Hanks as a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, consciously patterned after Mr. Darcy. Some viewers found Hanks simply too likable to be believable as the smug heir to a ruthless corporation, who takes a cruel joy in forcing small bookstores out of business.
  Awww, another independent bites the dust! (finger guns)
  • When you get right down to it, Sheriff Woody in Toy Story isn't a typical Hanks role, either (presumably, it's often overlooked due to being an animated film). Woody is a good guy at heart, yes, and he's a toy based on a heroic archetype (a lawman of the Wild West), but prior to his Character Development, he's also petty, selfish, and insecure about his age and his status as Andy's favorite.
  • His role of Col. Tom Parker in "Elvis (2022)" is nothing short of a dubious, highly manipulative conman, a far cry from his earlier roles of morally upright men.
• Michael Caine often played characters of the Lovable Rogue/First-Person Smartass type when younger, making his cold-blooded Sociopathic Hero in Get Carter fairly out of character. His character in Zulu is also against type, seeing as he is an Officer and a Gentleman, whereas Caine usually played lower class Cockney characters. Caine averted playing against type as Alfred the butler in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Trilogy trilogy by making it his type, keeping his Cockney accent. Then again, he's a butler with an interesting past.
• Prior to Airplane!, Leslie Nielsen, Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack, and Peter Graves were well-known as serious dramatic actors. Nielsen spent the rest of his career spoofing his former rep. Lloyd Bridges later appeared in both Hot Shots! comedies.
  • Speaking of Airplane!, there's also Barbara "June Cleaver" Billingsley as the jive talking old lady.
  • A double example in Leslie Nielsen: he played the darkly humorous villain Richard in the "Something To Tide Your Over" segment of the horror movie Creepshow. It feels like a perfect Venn diagram overlap of the two sides of his career: simultaneously funny and compelling.
  • Before Airplane!, Nielsen played a one-shot colonel on M*A*S*H, who is convinced by Hawkeye and Trapper to go on medical leave for battle fatigue. Technically a comedic role, he plays the Only Sane Man and is gaslit into taking leave.
• When Tim Burton cast Michael Keaton as Batman, audiences were dubious because Keaton was best known for his comedic roles, even though he just starred as a recovering drug addict in the drama Clean and Sober a year earlier. Burton already had a working relationship with Keaton and thought he would fit as the somewhat out-of-sync and antisocial Bruce Wayne that the script called for. Since that time, Keaton has played other menacing and even villainous characters. And one Sexually Ambiguous Ken Doll.
• When Heath Ledger was cast as the Joker in The Dark Knight, he was best known for playing hunky, romantic characters in films such as 10 Things I Hate About You, A Knight's Tale, and Casanova. Even his dramatic breakout role as a hunky, closeted gay rancher in Brokeback Mountain didn't stray all that far from his niche. Audiences had no idea what to expect from Ledger playing the downright evil Joker. And both the gay rancher and the Joker provided the page image. In the end, it worked pretty damn well.
• Johnny Depp was perceived as merely a teen idol - then he played Edward Scissorhands, an almost textbook example of The Grotesque, for Tim Burton. This is regarded as the turning point of Depp's career, so much so that eccentrics are his type whenever he works with Tim Burton. Also, Anthony Michael Hall was cast against type in that film as the brutish Jim; he was best known at the time for his nerdy roles. And a threefer in the young actors was Winona Ryder who had previously been known for moody adolescent roles in Beetlejuice and Heathers so the Girl Next Door role as Kim was something quite different for her.
  • The innocent, childlike Scissorhands has become a retroactive "against-type" role for Depp, with his gradual shift into eccentric Guile Heroes.
  • Depp is known for playing hammish and eccentric characters, especially in the last decade. In Transcendence, he's assuming one of his most subdued and realistic roles to date. Too subdued. Borderline HAL-9000 subdued.
• A Depression-era movie of A Midsummer Night's Dream cast James Cagney as Bottom.
  • Not to mention the fact that Cagney made his bones as a dancer and eventually made the transition to dramatic criminal roles.
  • Given his history as Hollywood's go-to actor for tough guys, it is telling that he won his Oscar for playing Broadway producer George M. Cohen in Yankee Doodle Dandy.
  • One of his last roles before his retirement was in the film One, Two, Three, a rare comedy role for Cagney, in which he plays the manager of a Coca Cola company in Germany, dealing with Russian officials, an unhappy wife and the Boss' daughter falling in love with a Commie. Hilarity Ensues. Really, it does!
• Jimmy Stewart was widely considered the most wholesome leading man in show business, but he subverted his type with a few roles, most by Alfred Hitchcock.
  • In Rear Window, the character L.B. Jefferies has bitter ideas about marriage and a touch of voyeurism in him.
  • He plays a Straw Nihilist, albeit a rather amiable and charming one, in Rope.
  • Stewart's '50s Westerns, directed by Anthony Mann, generally cast him as a tough, hard-bitten loner.
  • In Vertigo he plays an obsessive, borderline psychotic Anti-Hero.
  • In Anatomy of a Murder, he plays a lawyer, who is likeable enough, but there is an unsettling scene where he meets his client in jail, tells him that he has no defense other than insanity, and then leaves him alone to think about "how crazy he was."
  • His George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life starts out as a typical nice-guy role, then gradually morphs into an embittered, desperate near-suicide before snapping back for the happy ending.
  • An earlier (and milder) example is his casting as hard-bitten reporter Mike Connor in The Philadelphia Story. Mike is much more cynical and worldly than typical Jimmy Stewart characters of the time. However, he turns out to be a romantic at heart, and as the movie progresses he displays more and more of Stewart's boyish charm. It became Stewart's only Oscar-winning performance.
  • Another early role was in After the Thin Man, in which he seems to be a typical Stewart character, but at the end is revealed to be a psychotic scheming murderer.
  • The Greatest Show on Earth offers a two-for-one: he plays a mysterious and secretive clown who never removes his makeup, even between shows...because he's secretly a doctor on the run from the law for participating in the assisted suicide of his wife.
• Cary Grant as the villain in Hitchcock's Suspicion. Or Grant, known for roles in romantic comedies, being cast also by Hitchcock in espionage thrillers like Notorious and North By Northwest.
• Invoked by the director of From Here to Eternity, who deliberately cast the two female leads against type:
  • The bitter prostitute (though the Hays Code insists she's a nightclub hostess) Lorene (real name Alma) is played by Donna Reed - who was best known for wholesome Girl Next Door roles, her most famous one being George Bailey's saintly wife in It's a Wonderful Life.
  • Karen Holmes, the depressed officer's wife who has multiple affairs with his soldiers, is played by Deborah Kerr. She had spent her first years in Hollywood playing English Roses in Costume Dramas such as The Prisoner of Zenda, Black Narcissus, Young Bess, Quo Vadis etc. She took the role precisely to shake up her image.
• Eve Plumb, better known as Jan on The Brady Bunch, played a teen prostitute in the film Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway.
• Action icon/sex symbol Sean Connery is best known for playing badass characters with a lot of grit to them. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, however, he plays Indiana's father as a bumbling, somewhat aloof, academic pacifist who survives with creativity rather than action skills. Interestingly, he got named "sexiest man alive" the same year Last Crusade was released.
• Tony Curtis became famous with heroic roles. In Sweet Smell of Success, he played a skeevy press agent.
  • He plays the title role in The Boston Strangler a decade later!
  • He also had a notorious reputation for starring in comedies, which didn't stop him from having a major supporting role in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus.
• Before M, Peter Lorre was best known for his comedic roles. That must have been a jarring transition. While speaking about his career, Lorre once noted that he filmed a comedy around the time of M (he may have specifically mentioned Die Koffer des Herrn O.F.), and that M just happened to be released first. He speculated that, had the release dates been reversed, he would have had a career as a comedian instead of a villain.
• After Amélie, a film overflowing with sweetness and cuteness, Audrey Tautou starred in He Loves Me He Loves Me Not as a violent erotomaniac. The first half of the film mirrors Amélie; the second half...
• While it isn't a huge change, as the film is still pretty creepy, Vincent Price somewhat played against type in Edward Scissorhands, given that while his reputation is for Large Ham villains, in that movie he was a kindly scientist.
  • See also The Whales of August, where he plays a kindly (if mooching) old man and love interest to Lillian Gish.
  • After House of Wax (1953) established Price as That Guy Who Plays Villains, this was subverted in two William Castle movies ( House on Haunted Hill (1959) and The Tingler) where Price is set up as the obvious villain, only for the real baddie to be revealed as someone else in the final act, and suddenly, Vincent is the hero.
  • He also played the heroic sidekick in a single Golden Age 3D film, Son Of Sinbad.
  • A borderline example would be Witchfinder General; although Price plays yet another villain in this movie, his character isn't the Large Ham Magnificent Bastard he usually plays.
• Compare Allison Janney's role as the press secretary on The West Wing with her role as a nail stylist in Juno. It makes it about 20 times funnier. The West Wing would probably be the time she's playing against type, as she's been in many comedies like Drop Dead Gorgeous and Private Parts. Janney would then earn an Emmy for her role in the sitcom Mom.
• Seth Rogen got known playing wise-cracking characters who are often stoners. In Donnie Darko, however, he plays the school bully (though this was before his type was established), and in Observe and Report he plays a darkly unbalanced, bi-polar security guard. He is also The Green Hornet. And in Pineapple Express, while Rogen still plays a stoner, James Franco winds up as a bigger stoner than him.
• Pretty much the career of Anthony Perkins. Prior to Psycho he was known for playing sensitive young men and was an almost teen idol. After Psycho, him not playing a creepy psychopath was considered him playing against type.
  • Like a nerdy scientist in Disney's The Black Hole. He gets eviscerated in a surprisingly horrific scene.
  • Post-Psycho Perkins playing Inspector Javert of all people..
• Between Swingers and Made, Vince Vaughn dabbled in dramatic works such as The Cell and villainous creepy roles such as the evil stepfather in Domestic Disturbance and the role of Norman Bates himself in the 1998 Gus Van Sant remake of Psycho. During the phase, Roger Ebert once said of Vaughn, "[He] plays a creep better than just about anybody else."
• James Cromwell, the go-to guy for militant, ball-busting characters (he's the tall, intimidating evil exec of any movie that needs it), can soften up on occasion, from his signature role as the stern but human farmer in Babe to the eccentric, rock-and-roll loving scientist in Star Trek: First Contact.
• Armand Assante in Fatal Instinct. Normally he plays serious, even grim characters. In this comedy spoof he played his role absolutely straight and was hilarious. He had already tried out a somewhat goofy role in Belizaire The Cajun, where he is the title character - a Cajun folk healer and (sometime) womanizer in 1850s Louisiana. Although the film is primarily serious, the character of Belizaire is something of a joker but ends up being the hero of the film - and the cause of death for the villain.
• George Clooney, in the (paraphrased) words of Quentin Tarantino when he cast him for From Dusk Till Dawn, went from "playing a doctor in an Emergency Room to playing a guy that puts people in the emergency room". Also, Clooney heavily bearded, overweight, and tired in Syriana.
  • The Coen Brothers' film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, in addition to providing a Career Resurrection for Clooney after Batman & Robin flopped, helped to define his image as a fast-talking Lovable Rogue with a heart of gold - a type that Ocean's Eleven would help to cement a year later (humourously, in both movies he played a guy who gets out of jail at the beginning and is trying to get his estranged wife back). Sixteen years later, the Coen Brothers made Hail, Caesar!, where he plays a dimwitted, easily manipulated, Ambiguously Gay film star.
• Sylvester Stallone's attempted forays into comedy with Rhinestone, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, and Oscar. He also made a stab at acting credibility by playing an overweight and schlubby loser in Cop Land, which went a lot better than his comedy work.
  • He tried again in Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, as an aging villain... and it worked.
  • An early example is his role in Death Race 2000, in which he plays a mouthy Large Ham villain.
  • He made a strictly non-action performance in Reach Me, where he played a blog editor who serves as an antagonist.
• Mex Urtizberea was cast in the deadly serious movie Valentin after doing comedy for years in the sketch show Magazine For Fai.
• After doing nothing but comedy for his entire career, Alfredo Casero starred in the drama Todas Las Azafatas Van al Cielo.
• Will Ferrell has built his career on playing buffoonish or Jerkass comedy characters. But then he made a surprisingly emotional turn as a mild-mannered accountant in Stranger Than Fiction. He also starred in Everything Must Go as an alcoholic who get thrown out of his house and decides to sell all his possessions that have been chucked out as well.
  • Elf is a bit of a playing-against-type role for him, too; while he's still a bit of a buffoon in there, it's more "good-natured but exuberant Manchild" instead of "lecherous jerkass."
  • Speaking of Elf, you can make a case for tough-guy James Caan playing the straight man father figure to Will Ferrell's man-elf, his deadpan delivery leading to some laughs as well.
  • Ed Asner, who plays jolly old St. Nick himself in this movie, is better known for his curmudgeonly old characters like Lou Grant.
  • Ferrell then both plays his original type straight and subverts it simultaneously in The LEGO Movie. The LEGO character "President Business" is as Large Ham as they come, while The boy's dad that inspired the Business character is a rather stuffy accountant-type personality, more concerned with keeping things the way they were than allowing his son to express his creativity.
• Batman Begins had Liam Neeson, usually cast as the noble hero, as the villainous Ra's al Ghul, and Gary Oldman, usually cast as the villain (or at least violently conflicted anti-hero) as the heroic Jim Gordon, Batman's sole ally among the Gotham City police.
  • Gary Oldman in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, where he is very much a subversion of himself. He is set up to be the villainous Gary Oldman we all know, but when he finally appears, the big twist is that he was Good All Along.
• Speaking of Gary Oldman, he and Tim Roth were typecast as some of the all-time toughest villains and badasses of The '90s, but played totally against type as the title characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, where Oldman is an innocent Manchild and Roth is a neurotic paranoiac. Meanwhile, Richard Dreyfuss' character is kind of a badass.
  • Tim Roth interestingly subverted his "type" by playing a clever ex-con... in the fluffy Woody Allen musical Everyone Says I Love You.
  • Also, there's Tim Roth's comic turn in Four Rooms.
• Ralph Fiennes is widely known for his villainous roles like Voldemort in Harry Potter series, or the Nazi war criminal in Schindler's List; he was also cast as the romantic lead in the Rom Com Maid in Manhattan as a likable and sweet politician, and in Skyfall as Gareth Mallory, a Reasonable Authority Figure and Olivia Mansfield's successor as M. He also did a turn as the eccentric, Camp Straight, Sophisticated as Hell Jerk with a Heart of Gold Gustave H. in The Grand Budapest Hotel.
• Bradley Cooper, best known for nice guy roles like Will Tippin from Alias, plays one of the most despicable Romantic False Leads in romantic comedy history in Wedding Crashers. He jokes that he got the part because the director had never seen Alias. It seems like he's decided that it's his new type. He didn't exactly play sympathetic characters in He's Just Not That into You or The Hangover either. And to top it off, he also plays the obsessive, borderline-psychotic protagonist in The Midnight Meat Train.
• Dustin Hoffman's career and reputation as one of the supreme American actors began when he shed his image as the innocent Benjamin in The Graduate and played the disreputable Ratso in Midnight Cowboy.
• John Candy did a few serious roles, like the sleazy lawyer Dean Andrews in JFK. Even his role in Planes, Trains and Automobiles can be seen as this, as the role of Del Griffith has much more dramatic heft than anything else he had done up to that point.
• Josh Peck did this in The Wackness. In an earlier role Mean Creek he played a cruel, foul mouthed bully; before this he was usually the comic relief.
• Donald Pleasence, typically cast as slimy villains, reinvented himself as the heroic Dr. Loomis in Halloween (1978). Interestingly, John Carpenter's original choice for the role was the equally villain typecast Christopher Lee, and Rob Zombie's remake did the same thing by casting Malcolm McDowell in the role.
  • Pleasence was quick to point out, however, the role of Loomis re-typecast him. Whereas people had previously seen him only as a villain, he remarked that after the first two Halloween films, he found himself being cast solely as rescuers.
  • Pleasence also played the overweight, incompetent President of the United States in another John Carpenter film, Escape from New York.
  • Earlier in his career, Pleasence played one of the POWs in The Great Escape and an anti-Hitler conspirator in The Night of the Generals.
• While he never came out and gave this as the exact reason, Christopher Lee has gone on the record as saying that one of the few regrets he has about his career was turning down the role of Dr. Loomis. Probably because it would help him shake off the villainous reputation he's picked up (mostly for his endless Dracula movies and The Wicker Man, and revived by The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars). Lee gets to play a character with a sensitive side in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and in the biopic Jinnah (where he plays Mohammad Ali Jinnah, founder of modern Pakistan) but... that's really about it. And he did get to play the odd horror hero in movies like Horror Express, The Devil Rides Out, Crypt Of The Vampire, and Howling II.
  • There's also Lee as a gentlemanly gunsmith in Hannie Caulder, as an ultimately heroic businessman in Airport '77, as an American businessman with a (non-villainous) secret in Serial, as an elderly, sympathetic psychiatrist in Triage, as duplicitous good guy Mycroft Holmes in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, as a seemingly abusive father who's merely trying to protect his daughter from the influence of his deceased and decidedly wicked wife in The House That Dripped Blood, and a rare friendly alien in Space: 1999.
  • In perhaps a stroke of luck for the man, his very last onscreen role was a Role Reprise as Saruman in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies - as in, prior to Saruman's Face–Heel Turn. The "making of" documentary dedicates a good chunk to him explaining just how passionate he was about selling Saruman as a good guy.
  • One of Lee's final roles - and one he must have enjoyed for this exact reason - was playing the kindly owner of a train station bookstore in Hugo.
• Done for comedy/irony in Trick or Treat, a horror movie based around the moral panic over Satanic messages in rock and roll records. Gene Simmons plays the school DJ, while a very subdued Ozzy Osbourne is a moralizing, anti-rock fundamentalist.
• Peter Cushing, also considered for the role of Dr. Loomis in Halloween (1978), would not have been against type, as he was best known for playing Dr. Van Helsing in the Hammer Horror Dracula movies, starting with Horror of Dracula. However, he played an extremely evil version of the title character in Hammer's Frankenstein movies, starting with The Curse of Frankenstein (with the exception of the ironically named Evil of Frankenstein, where he's the hero). And younger audiences might know him best for blowing up Alderaan.
  • He and Christopher Lee had their roles inverted in the Hammer film The Gorgon. Cushing plays an obsessive doctor, trying to keep the town's dark secret covered up - bordering on outright Yandere at times. Lee plays the protagonist's good natured colleague who helps save the day.
    • Peter Cushing first tried this in AARU/Amicus' two Dalek movies in the mid-'60s, in which he played "Dr. Who" as a Cool Old Guy / Fun Personified science-hero.
• Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte casts Olivia de Havilland - known for playing The Ingenue and heroic good girls as the Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who tries to drive her cousin to insanity by Gaslighting her.
• Danny DeVito is usually cast as Jerkass or Jerk with a Heart of Gold characters, so seeing him play Andy Kaufman's friendly, grounded-in-reality agent George Shapiro in Man on the Moon is an interesting change of pace. In the same film, Vincent Schiavelli (best known for oddball-if-not-creepy roles such as the Subway Ghost in Ghost) appears as an uptight ABC executive, and Andy's sharp-but-down-to-earth girlfriend Lynne Margulies is played by Courtney Love.
• Elizabeth Berkley, fresh off of Saved by the Bell, tried to go radically against type in Showgirls. It was widely considered a poor choice at the time. It still is. Showgirls completely derailed her film career before it could even start.
• Throughout the Spanish-speaking world, Sergi Lopez was largely known as a family friendly, comedies-and-melodramas kind of a guy. In Dirty Pretty Things, however, he plays the villain, an organ-smuggler who preys on desperate immigrants. When Guillermo del Toro was casting Pan's Labyrinth, producers worried that Lopez wouldn't work as the villain, Captain Vidal. Ironically, the English-speaking world is probably most familiar with these two roles and Vidal is now consistently cited as one of the most despicable characters in recent cinema, and one of the greatest examples of a Classic Villain in fiction.
  • His turn toward villainous roles started with the title role in the French film Harry - He's Here to Help. Let's just say that Harry's advice for the protagonist takes a sinister turn.
• Sir John Gielgud as Hobson in Arthur (1981). Gielgud was best-known for playing stoic figures like King Henry IV, which lent him just the right amount of dignity to play a Servile Snarker Jeeves analogue.
• Gregory Peck, known for playing noble and dignified characters (such as Atticus Finch), had a few villains on his resume.
  • A racist gunslinger in Duel in the Sun, with Joseph Cotten playing his likeable brother.
  • He played unlikeable Anti Heros in two other Westerns, The Gunfighter and The Bravados.
  • Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick.
  • Most famously, Peck played Josef Mengele in the 1978 film The Boys from Brazil.
  • In one of his last movies, Old Gringo, he plays, in the words of co-star Jane Fonda, a "complete son of a bitch."
• The movie Oscar has Tim Curry as Genius Ditz Dr. Thornton Poole, most likely the least evil character he has ever played. That, or Nigel Thornberry (see Western Animation).
  • The Hunt for Red October sees Curry, known for playing hammy flamboyant villains as the subdued, paternal villain-in-name-only Dr. Petrov.
• Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith from The Matrix), Guy Pearce (Aldrich Killian from Iron Man 3), and Terence Stamp (General Zod (!) from Superman II) played Drag Queens in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
  • Similarly, Patrick Swayze and Wesley Snipes took up similar roles in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. While their co-star John Leguizamo is a comedian who's no stranger to performing in drag, Swayze and Snipes were way out of their element.
• Dean Jones plays the cruel, selfish veterinarian in Beethoven (one critic notes that in his Disney heyday, Jones would've been the sympathetic family man lead - as was the case in the animated TV series, where he voiced dad George^note played by Charles Grodin in the movie).
• Double playing against type in 3:10 to Yuma (1957) (1957): Glenn Ford, usually cast as a nice guy, plays a villain, and Van Heflin, in his career playing mostly villains, is the good guy.
• 3:10 to Yuma (2007) is also an example, as it has Russell Crowe (best known for playing heroes in movies like Gladiator and Master and Commander) as a Magnificent Bastard villain.
• Jan Malmsjö as Bishop Vergerus in Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. If IMDB is anything to go by, in his native Sweden he had been known up to this point only as a song-and-dance man, while Bishop Vergerus is... anything but.
• Adam West's first post-Batman (1966) role was as nightclub owner and retired assassin Johnny Cain in The Girl Who Knew Too Much. West intentionally took the role in hopes that it would erode his Typecasting. Of course, we all know how well that worked.
• Done three times in Double Indemnity. Fred MacMurray, these days best known as family man Steve Douglas, plays a glib murderer. Edward G. Robinson, usually either a villain or anti-hero, plays a fatherly Jerk with a Heart of Gold. And Barbara Stanwyck, who usually played the sweet but plucky heroine in romantic comedies, starts the film as if she might be reprising that role here as Phyllis Dietrichson. She's not. She's really not.
  • Another MacMurray example is The Apartment, where he plays Jack Lemmon's cheating, corrupt douchebag of a boss.
• Gerard Butler. Just look at the guy's filmography. He's been a vampire, the king of Sparta, The Phantom of the Opera, Marek in the movie version of Timeline...anyone else have anything to add?
  • Chauvinist morning show correspondent in The Ugly Truth?
  • His role in Dear Frankie could possibly be considered this.
  • Law Abiding Citizen. Iron Woobie on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Alan Rickman played against type in his 1990 romantic comedy Truly, Madly, Deeply, in which plays the ghost of the lead character's boyfriend. He also plays a saintly romantic hero in Sense and Sensibility. In most of Rickman's other roles, he plays dour, stodgy, or villainous characters. Or dour, stodgy, villainous characters.
• God save us all from Tobey Maguire when he goes utterly and frighteningly berserk as a Shell-Shocked Veteran-type soldier in Brothers (2009).
• For Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1941, Ingrid Bergman was supposed to play the sweet girl and Lana Turner the bad girl, but Bergman was tired of playing sweet girls and requested a switch.
• Matt Damon's and Heath Ledger's parts in The Brothers Grimm were originally meant to be the other way around.
  • On the topic of Matt Damon, he was mostly known for his dramatic roles, like in Good Will Hunting, before being cast against type as the action hero Jason Bourne
• Swedish actor/director Hasse Alfredson, mostly known as a comedian with improvised monologues as his forte, played viciously against type in The Simple-Minded Murderer (which he also directed), where he's a cruel sociopathic Nazi sympathizer.
• Jean-Claude Van Damme:
  • Van Damme plays against type as himself in JCVD.
  • He did one better in Replicant, playing both his usual ass-kicking character (a serial killer in this case) and an innocent, child-like clone of same.
  • He did it again in The Expendables 2, playing the villain.
• Swedish actor Peter Haber is hugely famous in Sweden for two roles, grizzled, but noble By-the-Book Cop Martin Beck in the Beck films, and bumbling, Homer Simpsonesque but sweet-natured Papa Rudolf in the "Sune"-series. So it come as a huge surprise when he played Martin Vanger in ''Men Who Hate Women'' (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo). For our American friends, picture Fred Rogers in the same role, and you understand how jarring the casting choice was to a Swedish audience.
• Liz White is best known for her role in Life On Mars as the caring and sympathetic policewoman Annie Cartwright but played very much against type as the titular child murdering ghost in The Woman in Black.
• Spanish actress Maribel Verdú had never played a comic book character prior to The Flash, where she portrayed Nora Allen.
• Whenever Morgan Freeman plays a villain role. Stephen King's Dreamcatcher anyone? Or how about Wanted? And then there's his role as "Boss" in Lucky Number Slevin!
  • Freeman got his first Oscar nomination for playing a nasty, violent pimp in 1987's Street Smart, a role that must come as a surprise for audiences who had previously known him mainly for his role as Easy Reader on The Electric Company (1971).
• John Travolta as cross-dressing, whale-sized mother in movie adaptation, Hairspray. Despite early success with Saturday Night Fever, Travolta never really moved out from under the shadow of his Vinny Barbarino character, and so failed to establish a film career until he was cast as a hitman in Pulp Fiction.
• Sir Alec Guinness in an over-the-top comedy role as the blind butler in Murder by Death would surprise anyone only familiar with his work in the epics of David Lean and/or the Star Wars films. But in fact, he was once best known as one of England's great comic actors, with such highlights as his epic eight roles in the black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (from kindly vicar to insolent old woman) and the gang leader in the original version of The Ladykillers (1955).
• In Bollywood, former action star Jackie Shroff as spiritual guru Shirdi Sai Baba◊ in Malik Ek.
• Arjun Rampal as a villain in Om Shanti Om.
• Big B himself, Amitabh Bachchan, in Aankhen.
  • And his first Hollywood role as Affably Evil Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby (2013) is a far cry from the tough gangster roles of his prime.
• Before his iconic role as Private Detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941), Humphrey Bogart had mainly been playing either psychotic or cowardly villains. Casting him as a romantic lead character in Casablanca (1942) was also considered an unusual choice by studio excecs. (An incredulous Jack Warner: "Who'd want to kiss Bogart?" Ingrid Bergman: "I would!")
  • He also went against his hard-boiled, cynic, cool persona in Sabrina, playing an awkward, withdrawn workaholic.
  • And again in The Caine Mutiny, playing an experienced but unstable martinet of a naval officer who slowly goes to pieces.
• Star Trek (2009) featured several examples:
  • Eric Bana, who got his start in Australia as a comedian and went on to play hunky hero types in Hollywood, plays Nero.
    • Watch Chopper, Eric Bana can really play screwed up.
  • John Cho, best known as one half of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, plays badass action Sulu.
  • Karl Urban, probably best known as Éomer from The Lord of the Rings, as The McCoy.
  • Which probably nagged him the titular role in the Judge Dredd remake, which is slowly turning into his new type now.
  • And the biggest one of all, Zachary Quinto - then best known for playing a super-powered Serial Killer on Heroes - as Spock.
• Jamie Foxx surprised some people by playing a nerdy taxi driver in Collateral, though he played several weasely characters in his earlier career.
  • And then he played Ray Charles...
• Tom Cruise has a fairly tight niche playing powerful, self-confident men with varying levels of Jerkass. He surprised some audiences by playing a straight villain in Collateral, though he had already played a villain in Interview with the Vampire. Cruise's role as the fat, balding foul-mouthed villain Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder also surprised people, as it was a rare venture into comedy.
• Precious, has Mo'Nique as the title character's abusive mother, which is very much against type for her. She's usually a Sassy Black Woman in comedies. Likewise, she departs from her usual routine in Shadowboxer, a dark crime thriller where she plays a Woman Scorned.
  • Mariah Carey also plays against type in the film. See the glamorous diva play an unglamorous social worker. So much indeed that her Beauty Inversion provides the image example for the trope.
• The thriller The Watcher criss-crossed actor types by casting James Spader as the cop and Keanu Reeves as the serial killer. In the same year, Reeves also played an abusive redneck boyfriend in The Gift (2000). Spader has played a number of sympathetic characters, though he was known for his creep roles at the time.
  • Spader also had this back in 1990 when Bad Influence cast the normally (even then) Jerkass Spader as a nice guy and Rob Lowe (!) as the villain.
  • And in 1994 when he played the Adorkable archaeologist Dr. Daniel Jackson in Stargate.
• Andy Griffith, best known as either kindly small-town sheriff Andy Taylor or no-nonsense defense attorney Ben Matlock, got his first big acting break as Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, a superficially charming con man drunk with power in Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd. Griffith became so engrossed in the role that he started incorporating his character's mannerisms into his everyday life, and became so disgusted with himself that he refused to play villains ever again. He broke this streak in the late 1980s, playing a heartless judge who sentences an adolescent girl to hard time in federal prison in a TV movie made at the height of his Matlock fame.
• Southland Tales features a few intentional invocations of the trope. Schlubby comic Jon Lovitz plays a murderous corrupt cop. Comedienne Cheri Oteri plays an anarchist.
• 3000 Miles to Graceland: Kevin Costner, normally the hero, plays a psychopathic who in threatens to kill a fellow robber (David Arquette!) for suggesting that Frank Sinatra could take Elvis Presley in a fight.
• Harrison Ford spends most of What Lies Beneath as Michelle Pfeiffer's concerned husband, until we discover he murdered the young girl whose ghost haunts Pfeiffer.
  • Ford also played an unlikable character in Mosquito Coast, which he says was one of the reasons for the film's financial failure. He was a scientist who, while well-meaning, yells at Brendan Fraser, in Extraordinary Measures.
  • While not unlikable per se, his roles in more drama/comedic or family films such as Regarding Henry and Working Girl were not the usual everyman action hero that Ford is normally cast as.
  • And he's plays the thoroughly unsympathetic Colonel Hyrum Graff in the film adaptation of Ender's Game—which is, oddly enough, a famous Genre Deconstruction of the kinds of stories that Ford's most famous film made popular.
  • Though pre-stardom, Ford's scheming corporate assistant in The Conversation also counts.
• Tom "Tiny" Lister, usually typecast in his movie appearances as the Scary Black Man (for example Zeus in No Holds Barred and the unnamed convict who resolves the remote dilemma in The Dark Knight), made a rather decent go as the President of Earth in Luc Besson's The Fifth Element.
• Amy Adams:
  • She became famous for playing perky cuties such as Enchanted, Junebug, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Night at the Museum, Sunshine Cleaning etc. However this was actually against type for her; early in her career she played bad girls and villains in various TV shows. She was even Catherine in Cruel Intentions 2.
  • After getting typecast as cuties, David O Russell put her in The Fighter as a Hard-Drinking Party Girl who gets into fights. She then played a scarily creepy Lady Macbeth in The Master.
• In Lake Placid, we see Betty White (previously the sweet, ditzy Rose Nylund on The Golden Girls) as Mrs. Delores Bickerman, a foul-mouthed, possibly insane local who fed her husband to a giant crocodile. Also see The Golden Girls entry here.
• Jesse Metcalfe played the eponymous casanova of John Tucker Must Die. He earlier played Van Mcnulty, a bigot determined to hunt down and kill everyone with superpowers, with Clark Kent marked as big game, on Smallville.
• Alan Arkin often plays an Everyman or the Only Sane Man— and is absolutely terrifying as the psychotic Harry Roat in Wait Until Dark (1967).
• The famously beautiful Uma Thurman doesn't seem to be doing this in Percy Jackson and the Olympians, then comes The Reveal that her character is Medusa. Not to mention her role as Poison Ivy in Batman & Robin.
• Similar to Carrey, Adam Sandler started out playing childish buffoons, then he graduated to romantic comedies, than turned serious in Punch-Drunk Love and Reign Over Me. Neither one was financially successful, so he's reverted to the middle ground between immature idiot and Kavorka Man.
  • Oddly enough, his role in Punch Drunk Love wasn't actually all that different from his better-known roles: man child with social issues who is awkward around women and has a bit of a violent streak. It was just that it was no longer played for laughs.
  • His role in Uncut Gems, as Howard Ratner, an amoral jeweler and gambling addict, is a far cry from the comedic roles he is known for.
• Glenn Close, the go-to actress for power hungry female tyrants, Manipulative Bitches and heartless villainesses in general, plays the 'nice girl' in The Natural, as well as Mona Simpson in The Simpsons. She's also the Reasonable Authority Figure in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). Also her role as Sarah, the wife atoning for her own infidelity in The Big Chill.
• George Carlin played an atypically serious role in Kevin Smith's Jersey Girl, as a grandfather who takes sick leave to care for his granddaughter that her father's been neglecting.
  • It is also worth mentioning his turn as one of the narrators of Thomas & Friends, which was quite a change from his reputation as an off-color comedian.
• Played for laughs in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back where Mark Hamill is the Cocknocker, a supervillain with a massive right fist.
• Ironically, Mark Hamill's Star-Making Role as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars turned out to be this, since he spent the bulk of his career playing villains.
• On a similar note, Daniel Radcliffe has become known for playing eccentric weirdos, making his earlier, iconic role as Harry Potter a retroactively unusual case of him playing a straightforward hero.
• Rupert Grint (best known as Ron Weasley) admitted that he made a conscious effort to play against type in the Irish teen drama Cherrybomb (2009), in which he can be seen swearing, drinking, stealing, having sex, and snorting cocaine.
• Beverley Mitchell, best known as the middle daughter in 7th Heaven, plays a jigsaw victim in Saw II.
• Shahid Kapur, often associated to romantic movies like Jab We Met and Film/Vivah, plays a gangster in Kaminey.
• Haylie Duff, usually in teen comedy roles like her sister Hilary, played a frontier-era doctor in Love Takes Wing and Love Finds A Home.
• And it's not like Hilary Duff hasn't played against type herself, as anyone who's seen War, Inc. (an overlysexed Middle Eastern pop star who stuffs scorpions down her pants for fun? You never got that on Lizzie McGuire) or Greta will testify.
• Gina Gershon mostly plays Manipulative Bitches, raunchy seductresses, and several other villainous types. But in Ugly Betty, she plays a campy, hilariously over-the-top cosmetics mogul.
• Peter Sellers never really had a type per se, but by the end of the 1970s his best-known role by far was Large Ham Funny Foreigner Inspector Clouseau in the slapstick series The Pink Panther, so seeing him as the serene, subdued Chance in the satire Being There was a real change of pace (he was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar).
• Stand-up comedian and comic actor Dane Cook as the bitter, abrasive "Mr. Smith" trying to blackmail the title serial killer in Mr. Brooks.
• Prior to playing a Hooker with a Heart of Gold in Leaving Las Vegas, Elisabeth Shue was primarily associated with having a Girl Next Door image.
• Alyssa Milano wished to shed her "good girl" image from her days as Samantha from Who's the Boss?, so she played sex-crazed maniacs in Embrace of the Vampire (1995), Fear (1996), Poison Ivy 2: Lily, and the The Outer Limits (1995) episode "Caught in the Act", as well as numerous television roles where she played very sexual characters. Given her, shall we say, consistency in preferred roles, and the time she and her mother sued porn sites for distributing images of Alyssa not because they wanted the pictures removed, but because they wanted a cut of the profits, one could argue that she was playing against type back in her "good girl" days.
• Chris Farley played the more level headed sidekick (usually reserved for David Spade) in Almost Heroes, rather than the Idiot Hero.
• Ronald Reagan, who usually played the Best Friend or B-Movie Hero types, was a brutal, vicious crime kingpin in his last film, The Killers.
• Halle Berry in Monster's Ball. She played a Hollywood Homely down-on-her-luck waitress who often physically and verbally abused her overweight son (who later gets hit by a car and dies), lost her convicted murderer of a husband (played by Sean "P. Diddy" Combs) to the electric chair, and then infamously banged Billy Bob Thornton. This role won her an Oscar.
• Julia Roberts' Oscar-winning turn as the trash-talking, trampy-dressing Erin Brockovich was a departure from her usual characters. Mary Reilly was also a different role for her - a period drama in which she played a dowdy and repressed Fake Irish Victorian maid. Critics were impressed with the former role, but not the second one.
• Hugh Jackman became an international star from playing Wolverine in the X-Men Film Series, a role he played for 18 years. But it was actually a departure from his usual wheelhouse of musicals and dramas. He won a Tony in 2004 for The Boy From Oz and was nominated for an Oscar in 2012 for Les Misérables (2012). Besides Wolverine, he rarely plays grizzled action heroes. You need only compare his cover of Muscle and Fitness where he portrays Wolverine, versus his cover of Good Housekeeping where he's his normal self.
• Jake Gyllenhaal: action hero? In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, yes. Complete with a quite-decent Fake British accent.
• Zac Efron, he of High School Musical, Hairspray, and 17 Again (2009) fame, as a young man tormented by the death of his kid brother in Charlie St. Cloud.
  • And his (former) squeeze, the usually sweet and demure Vanessa Hudgens, as a kickass gun-toting babe in Sucker Punch and a stripper in Frozen Ground. (Not to mention her roles in Spring Breakers, Machete Kills, Gimme Shelter and even Bandslam. It's getting to the point that playing someone sweet and demure — like Kailani in Journey 2: The Mysterious Island — is Playing Against Type for her.)
  • In a What Could Have Been example, Efron expressed interest in starring in an American adaptation of Death Note, whose protagonist Light Yagami is a murderous Well-Intentioned Extremist with a God complex. Though fans were vehemently against the idea, they admitted that he at least looked like Light.
• Woody Allen's Scoop has two examples; sex symbol Scarlett Johansson plays a nerdy bespectacled student journalist investigating a murder, and Hugh Jackman plays the murderer.
  • Scarlett has been through at least two type changes. Initially, she played Nice Girl heroines in films such as Lost in Translation. Then, starting with The Prestige, she started playing duplicitous, untrustworthy or outright villainous characters. It's getting to the point where playing a Nice Girl heroine - like Kelly Foster in We Bought A Zoo - is Playing Against Type for her.)
• David Suchet, who starred as Hercule Poirot in the TV series from 1989 until it ended in 2013, appeared in Executive Decision in 1996, playing the Big Bad moustacheless Muslim terrorist.
  • He was also the Big Bad in Iron Eagle, though he did still have a moustache- if a more sedate one- in that one.
• Ashton Kutcher as an action hero in Killers. It was still a comedic role. He played it straight in The Butterfly Effect and The Guardian.
• Sean Penn, who nowadays is known for being a dramatic actor, in his early acting career was known for his comedic roles most notably as Jeff Spicoli a pot smoking hippie surfer in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. At one point he was considered to be a has-been, due to a combination of inability to escape that typecasting and some personal problems.
• Philip Seymour Hoffman, usually known for playing villains or tragic types, made a nice romantic turn as a limo driver in Jack Goes Boating, a film that he also directed.
• Geoffrey Rush, Oscar winner for Shine and longtime dramatic actor (to this day) outright re-defined his career as Barbossa in the Pirates of the Caribbean series.
• Michael Madsen, known for playing malevolent bad guys, played the kindly adoptive father in Free Willy, which rather confused his younger fans who saw him in that first and then were later horrified to see Glenn hacking off a cop's ear. Earlier he played a nice guy in Thelma & Louise and actually acknowledged how rare it was for him not to play a villain. And he's The Hero in Species.
• Fredric March was best known for playing light comedy and minor romantic parts when Robert Mamoulian cast him in the title roles of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), in which he was so terrifying that he won the first (and for sixty years only) Best Actor Oscar for a horror role.
• After playing oldest sister D.J. Tanner on the happy-go-lucky family sitcom Full House, Candace Cameron was subsequently cast as a victim of a physically abusive relationship in the Lifetime movie No One Would Tell.
  • Fred Savage, who's best known as Kevin Arnold from The Wonder Years and as the grandson from The Princess Bride, earned his spot on this list by co-starring with Cameron as her abuser.
• David Arquette is associated with goofy comedic roles, but starred in the Holocaust drama The Grey Zone.
• Jackie Brown: Robert De Niro as a slovenly hoodlum. Also, Sid Haig, who usually plays villains in B-movies, has a small role as a judge.
• Comedian Chi McBride as the serious but kind FBI agent in Mercury Rising, who is the immediate superior to Bruce Willis' undercover expert.
• Danielle Harris, usually a Final Girl or victim in horror films, turns out to be the killer in Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet. It is awesome.
• Kathy Bates as a milquetoast housewife in Fried Green Tomatoes.
• An earlier role, but Maggie Gyllenhaal as a Satan-worshipping Cloudcuckoolander in Cecil B. Demented. And it is also awesome.
• Rob Schneider is probably better known for playing Funny Foreigners or one kind of Butt-Monkey or another. Well, in The Benchwarmers, not only is he a competent, respectable, dignified male lead who often serves as The Only Sane Man compared to other more zany characters, his character is an excellent baseball player with genuine depth as a Reformed Bully trying to atone for his past actions. The film had its problems, but Rob's performance was quite a welcomed break from the norm.
• Leonard Nimoy (besides playing Spock from the show Star Trek) was actually famous for voicing Galvatron, one of the most vile and despicable Decepticons that ever lived. However, he was cast as the noble and wise Autobot Sentinel Prime in Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
  • Subverted by the fact that Sentinel turns out to have been Evil All Along.
  • For that matter, Patrick Dempsey. That's right. Dr. McDreamy is playing a slimeball businessman who sold out to the Decepticons in order to ensure his own survival.
  • Nimoy was also specially cast as Dr. David Kibner in an attempt to break him out of typecasting.
• Anthony Hopkins, typically known for serious or villainous roles, portrayed the happy-go-lucky motorbike racer Burt Munro in The World's Fastest Indian. Hopkins was on record saying that the role of Burt Munro was one of his most enjoyable, because Munro's outlook on life was not much different to his own.
  • Another excellent but often-overlooked role of his is Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the extremely eccentric health guru of The Road to Wellville.
  • Actually the reverse is just as true- Before Silence of the Lambs Anthony Hopkins was better known for playing quite mild-mannered woobieish characters such as Pierre in War and Peace and Frederick Treeves in The Elephant Man and even afterwards he continued in those roles such as in The Remains of the Day and Shadowlands (where he played a very woobieish C. S. Lewis). The thing was that for all his acclaim on stage and in those roles he couldn't give a toss about them and yearned for the speed and glamour of big budget cinema. Also in interviews it's quite hard to imagine that this very self-effacing, shy, sweet man with a soft Welsh lilt and not an ounce of ego could have it in him to play someone like Lecter.
• Jamie Lee Curtis did this twice. The start of her film career was playing the Final Girl in the original slasher films, then she did an about face and played a prostitute in Trading Places. The 1985 Perfect made her a sex symbol but that didn't work out so well and she switched to playing quirky housewife characters in various genres.
• Bubbly and cheerful Reese Witherspoon who stars in Legally Blonde and similarly feelgood romantic comedies plays the violent, white-trash and vicious Vanessa in Freeway. Also Election, where she plays a frumpy, overachieving, manipulative and psychotic bitch.
• Comedian Jackie Vernon, best known as the voice of Frosty the Snowman, played a psychotic and cannibalistic serial killer in Microwave Massacre.
• Adrien Brody, best known for playing nerdy characters or appearing in dramatic roles, did action turns in King Kong (2005), Predators, and The Experiment.
• Helena Bonham Carter used to play proper English ladies. Then she starred in Fight Club, and now she's always playing batshit insane women who look like Cesare. (Although that may also have been related to her marriage to Tim Burton.)
• Roy Cheung is best known for playing psychopathic triad gangsters and other villains, such that his role as a Shaolin monk in The Infernal Affairs Trilogy was very much this.
• Steve Carell, who always either plays a dimwitted buffoon or a nuanced Everyman, in Little Miss Sunshine as a gay, suicidal Proust scholar, and in The Way, Way Back as a Jerkass boyfriend and nominal villain. Even these might not prepare you for his chilling performance in Foxcatcher.
• James Fox usually plays Upper Class Twits (like Veruca Salt's dad in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), but did an excellent (and surprising) turn as a vicious working-class gangster in Performance.
• Shah Rukh Khan, the Bollywood megastar, managed early on his career to play really evil characters in Darr, Baazigar and worst of all, Anjaam, in which he scared several people shitless. Somehow he managed to glide over to the romantic-interest/hero roles, which is pretty rare because in indian cinema "Once a villain, always a villain". If something, Shah Rukh Khan is better known as one of the few indian actors that doesn't have a type, as he can pull romantic or action hero roles the same way he can pull a villain ones.
• Jackie Chan in Shinjuku Incident. When watching this movie, don't expect him to pull off any of his high flying kung fu or watching him act like the comedic quirky hero he's normally seen as.
  • His role in The Foreigner is also a significant departure for him. Jackie Chan is still playing the hero, sure, but his character is spurred into action when a terrorist attack claims the life of his daughter. Don't expect much Amusing Injuries going in.
• Albert Brooks, always known for playing comedic protagonists or the neurotic comic relief, played the ruthless and sinister crime lord Bernie Rose in Drive (2011).
• Sarah Paulson is generally known for her comic work, but shows up as a One-Scene Wonder in Serenity as a scientist who delivers a horrible message before being killed. She was deliberately cast in a dramatic role because Joss Whedon feels that comedy is the harder of the two.
  • She was also quite convincing as a manipulative bitch in a couple episodes of Deadwood.
• Edward Norton is known mainly for his leading man roles. Yet somewhere in his filmography you find the The Italian Job (2003). He also plays the main villain in The Bourne Legacy.
  • Norton is also known for playing gritty, moody, unidealized characters. Death to Smoochy casts him, opposite Robin Williams, as a squeaky-clean, naively optimistic children's entertainer.
• Ryan Seacrest played himself as a smarmy, carping, foul-mouthed narcissist in Knocked Up, in stark contrast to his likable, wholesome, nice-guy image.
• Inverted with Michael Caine in Zulu. He would go on to play working class Cockney characters throughout his career and plays a snobby aristocratic officer with a posh accent in this movie — his first.
• Known for his comedic roles in Knocked Up, Superbad, and Get Him to the Greek, Jonah Hill stars in the drama Moneyball, and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
• Eddie Deezen is one of the ultimate nerds on film... which is why he was naturally cast as a bully in Laserblast. Mike and the Bots had fun with this.
  • In I Love You, Eddie Deezen, he's the straight-up, no-fooling romantic lead.
• The Apartment has two: Jack Lemmon, known for playing comedic secondary characters, plays the still somewhat comedic, but also dramatic lead, and Fred MacMurray, who at the time was widely recognized as the dad from My Three Sons, played his adulterous, selfish, and all-around asshole of a boss.
• The producers of Flightplan (2005) cast Sean Bean specifically to make viewers think he was part of the villainous plot.
  • Same with Rufus Sewell in The Tourist. Actually his character is just a Red Herring.
• The African-American anthology horror film Tales from the Hood has In Living Color!'s David Alan Grier playing a brutal man who abuses his girlfriend and her son.
• When the first Tremors movie was beginning production, the studio was pushing for Michael Gross as Burt Gummer. Gross was then coming off the successful Family Ties (where he played Steven Keaton, an ex-flower child and the calm patriarch) and the studio was hoping his fame would be an asset. Of course, Burt was characterized as a conspiracy theorist with an itchy trigger finger. Casting was hesitant to say the least, but Gross wowed them at the audition (and he wound up being the only actor to be in every part of the ensuing franchise).
• James Belushi as Ax-Crazy criminal and Domestic Abuser Frank in 1997 SF thriller Retroactive.
• A.J. Buckley is mostly known for playing nerdy, sarcastic types, both in CSI: NY and Supernatural, but contrast them to one of his earliest roles as the psychotic Jerk Jock Chug in Disturbing Behavior.
• Miley Cyrus, aka Hannah Montana, played troubled teens in The Last Song and LOL, and plays a hardnosed police officer hiding undercover as a college student in the upcoming So Undercover. Two new rumored projects will have her playing a young woman who can see into other people's dreams in paranormal Wake, and as the daughter of a super spy in action film Family Bond.
• Chris Evans is best known for playing characters who are smart alecs and/or pretty boys such as Johnny Storm. So it came as quite a shock to see him play the serious, strait-laced Nice Guy Captain America in Captain America: The First Avenger and The Avengers. Surprisingly, he made it work.
  • Chris Evans also plays a hilariously douchey evil ham in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.
  • Want something very out of character? Two words: Fierce People.
• Sticking with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Captain America: The Winter Soldier has one of the major villains be played by Robert Redford, of all people.
• Jet Li
  • He is known for playing the heroic badass in many a martial-arts action flick, has played villains in Lethal Weapon 4, The One, War (2007) and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, though his villainous roles are sometimes subverted.
  • The biggest example of Li playing against type was in the Hong Kong film Ocean Heaven, which is a romantic drama in which Li plays a janitor at an aquarium and father to a special needs child, and he doesn't bust a single martial arts move.
• Denzel Washington is known for playing the moral leading man in most of his films. So much so, that he was challenged to play a villain role by other actors. When he talked about it with his family, one of his sons also wanted to see if he could pull it off. Along comes Training Day, where Washington plays a corrupt police officer. He won an Oscar for the role.
• Matthew Fox has largely played either nice guys or conflicted heroes, most notably in Party of Five and Lost. In 2012's Alex Cross, he plays a psychopathic professional hitman who kills (among other people) the main character's wife. Fox even went so far as to lose 35-40 pounds and followed an incredibly strict exercise regimen, to the point that his body looked like it was nothing but muscle and bone. Needless to say the character was about as far from Charlie Salinger and Jack Shephard as he could get.
• 1992's Captain Ron is a comedy starring Kurt Russell and Martin Short in which a dedicated family man buys a boat captained by a total lunatic. Short is the family man and Russell is the lunatic.
• Emma Watson, known for her roles as intellectual feminists such as Belle in Beauty and the Beast (2017),^note And Hermione Granger has done or is doing this no less than twice: as Manic Pixie Dream Girl Sam in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and as brainless Villain Protagonist Nicki in Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring. She also portrays an Ax-Crazy, sailor-mouthed ("I'm not fucking around!") version of herself in This Is the End and a Manipulative Bitch who tries to ruin her family's reputation in Regression.
• Neville Brand is well known for numerous tough guy and gangster roles. But he played a humane, even lenient, prison guard in The Birdman Of Alcatraz.
• In Lincoln, Sally Field, who's known for playing sweet, motherly characters, plays Honest Abe's bitter, controlling and highly unstable wife, Mary Todd Lincoln. This isn't Field's first time bucking typecasting. She followed Gidget and The Flying Nun with the shockingly dark and horrifying Sybil, which won her an Emmy, then followed the lighthearted Smokey and the Bandit with the gritty and dramatic Norma Rae, which won her her first Oscar. Basically, Sally Field has made a career out of playing against type.
• Steve Martin, universally known for comedy roles, played a completely noncomedic but Affably Evil role in The Spanish Prisoner.
• Rebel Wilson, who has made a career out of playing the Lower-Class Lout, plays a doctor in Michael Bay's Pain & Gain.
  • Dwayne Johnson almost backed out of the role of Doyle, not because it wasn't an interesting character to play but it was so removed from where his comfort zone was. Even as an Anti-Hero he would still have some noble and heroic qualities so playing someone who goes so far south was intimidating.
• David Cronenberg likes to do this with actors such as Viggo Mortensen in a deconstruction of his square-jawed heroic pigeonhole he found himself in after The Lord of the Rings in A History of Violence. He also gave teen heartthrob Robert Pattinson a chance to do something very different in Cosmopolis.
• James McAvoy is typically known for portraying Wide Eyed Idealists and/or intellectuals, but he does occasionally break out from the cookie-cutter mold Hollywood has placed him in.
  • You wouldn't expect a slim, 5'7", non-macho actor be the star of an action movie, but he got to do just that in Wanted.
  • In Trance, it's disconcerting to learn that his character is a homicidal Domestic Abuser.
  • Many people were surprised to see him as the greasy, racist, misogynist, homophobic, fast-food and drug junkie cop Bruce Robertson in Filth.
  • Split gave him the opportunity to stretch his acting muscles as a creep with dissociative identity disorder with over 20 personalities who kidnaps three teenage girls and locks them in his basement.
• Scream:
  • In Scream 3, despite the cast including Lance Henriksen, the killer is played by Scott "Noel from Felicity" Foley.
  • Scream 4 offered what was a straight example when it first came out, but turned into a subversion as time went on and the actor in question underwent a type of Tom Hanks Syndrome. The mastermind behind the massacre is played by Emma Roberts, who at the time was a Teen Idol best known for the Nickelodeon Kid Com Unfabulous and for assorted family films and teen comedies. Nowadays, though, she's best known for her Alpha Bitch roles on American Horror Story and Scream Queens (2015), meaning that newer audiences are more likely to expect her to be the killer. The film marks something of a turning point in Roberts' career, in fact, as she began taking on these Alpha Bitch roles immediately after this one. Joe Reid, writing for Polygon, referred to The Reveal as "the precise moment in time when Nancy Drew Emma Roberts evolved into American Horror Story Emma Roberts."
• Go watch the film Triple Dog, which stars Britt Robertson as Chapin. Then compare Chapin to Robertson's three most commonly known roles (Cassie Blake, Allie Pennington, and Lux). You should notice a rather striking difference.
• Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa became a matinee idol in silent movies playing romantic leads. He's best-known today as the villainous Colonel Saito from The Bridge on the River Kwai.
• Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Cercle rouge features Andre Bourvil, a famous French comic actor, playing a ruthless police inspector. It's considered by many his best performance.
• The 2010 version of The Killer Inside Me (the book was filmed before in 1976) allows Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson to take a rather drastic break from the roles they're known for (and not only because the latter two get Killed Off for Real).
• Alba does this again in Awake (2007) as the sweet fiancee of ailing millionaire Hayden Christensen who wants to kill him for his money.
• And again in the little-seen An Invisible Sign (as a troubled math teacher - one of her few roles which doesn't call for her to be as sexy as all hell).
• Donald O'Connor was well known for his comedic roles in (most of) the Francis the Talking Mule films and Singin' in the Rain, and being the romantic lead in many musical comedies. It is very strange to hear him in the radio drama from Suspense called "Smiley" where he plays a creepy psychopath with a vendetta against women.
  • Suspense was good at casting actors (most of whom were known for comedy) against type. For instance, Jim and Marion Jordan, better known as Fibber McGee and Molly, played a couple held hostage by a killer in the episode "The Killer In The Backseat". On top of that, show runner Elliot Lewis was otherwise known as a comedic actor- best known for playing Frankie Remley on the Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show.
• Neighbors, John Belushi's last film, originally cast him as one half of a loud, brash couple who move in next door to milquetoast Dan Aykroyd - but they decided to swap roles, resulting in two people Playing Against Type for the price of one.
• The World's End, the final film in Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's "Three Colors Cornetto" trilogy, reverses the traditional dynamic between Simon Pegg and Nick Frost that the first two movies started. While Pegg and Frost still play a pair of mismatched friends who give each other hell, Frost is the comparatively straight-laced one this time (playing a responsible White Collar Worker), with Pegg as the Adult Child slacker who goads him into mischief.
• Speaking of Pegg:
  • Hot Fuzz was made after Pegg's type had been established as an amiable but fairly directionless slacker in Spaced and Shaun of the Dead. In Fuzz, he plays a humourless and overly-driven police officer who is Married to the Job.
  • The Australian film Kill Me Three Times casts him as a ruthless hitman, although, given that the film is a Black Comedy, the character still has a lot of Pegg's trademark snarky charm.
• Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson and the above-mentioned Vanessa Hudgens in Spring Breakers, as a part of a group of friends who rob a bank to pay for their spring break, then get caught up in the affairs of a drug and arms dealer who bails them out of jail and attempts to use them as partners in crime. Miss Gomez also plays a teenage car jacker in the 2013 film Getaway.
• Emily Osment, best known for playing Miley Stewart's awkward skater girl BFF Lilly Truscott, appeared in a action web series called Cleaners with Emmanuelle Chriqui, as one of a pair of contract killers on the run. If posts on her Twitter page are any indication, she will definitely be doing plenty of kickboxing.
  • She also appeared in the film Kiss Me, a drama where she played the best friend of a teenage scoliosis victim coming of age.
• When people first hear about Mad Dog And Glory, a film about a struggling nebbish of a comedian and a mobster starring Bill Murray and Robert De Niro, they are very much in for a surprise as to who is playing who.
• Django Unchained: Heart-throb and charismatic leading man Leonardo DiCaprio plays a disgusting villain. In addition, Christoph Waltz, normally known for his villain roles, plays a Crazy Is Cool Cultured Badass who becomes a mentor to the title character.
• Kiefer Sutherland typically plays macho roles such as Jack Bauer, David from The Lost Boys and Ace Merrill from Stand by Me, but also played a geeky scientist in Dark City. He also voiced the creepy sniper in Phone Booth.
• Matthew Broderick, who usually plays the Nice Guy or Only Sane Man, had played a Small Name, Big Ego-type Idiot Hero in Inspector Gadget (1999) as well a Villain Protagonist in Deck the Halls.
• Jesse Eisenberg who plays an Adorkable Badass Bookworm had play the Too Dumb to Live Idiot Hero in 30 Minutes or Less. He plays that type of character again in American Ultra.
• Charlie Day, who's more famous as the insane and mentally deficient Cloudcuckoolander Charlie on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, plays the brilliant and excitable Dr. Newton Geizler on Pacific Rim. He's joked that he found it fun playing someone who can actually read. He would later follow this up with the slimy, villainous arms dealer Acapulco in Hotel Artemis, a character who's definitely not as likeable as his previous roles.
• A year after playing a sexually voracious Depraved Bisexual in Basic Instinct, Sharon Stone played a very sexually repressed Damsel in Distress in Sliver. She went from someone who proudly didn't wear underwear to someone who had to be coaxed into removing her panties. Still a year later, she played the even more repressed Ice Queen/Stepford Smiler wife of an architect in the film Intersection. She specifically asked for the role of the wife rather than the mistress to get away from the image set forth by the Basic Instinct role.
• Tilda Swinton typically plays Ice Queen roles who - if they aren't villainesses - are still rather mean. In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button she plays a Shrinking Violet who teaches the protagonist about love.
• Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn were both doing this in Bringing Up Baby. Grant normally played cool suave guys but plays a bumbling nerd. Hepburn was normally a Plucky Girl but instead played a zany Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
• Sara Paxton in Aquamarine. Before that she was either a troubled teen or an Alpha Bitch. In fact she was originally approached to play the Alpha Bitch Cecilia but insisted on playing the eponymous character who is a Genki Girl Pollyanna (as well as being a mermaid^note Sara Paxton is a huge mermaid lover. Also in The Last House on the Left where she plays a shy teenage girl that ends up as a rape victim.
• Chad Michael Murray, Elisha Cuthbert and Paris Hilton in House of Wax. Chad Michael Murray was previously known for teen heartthrob roles in One Tree Hill, A Cinderella Story and Freaky Friday; here he plays a juvenile delinquent who smokes, drinks, steals cars and beats the living crap out of the bad guys. Cuthbert had just come off playing a porn star in The Girl Next Door which had all but solidified her as Ms. Fanservice; here she played the Final Girl. Paris had essentially either cameo'd in films or played characters that were basically herself (Nine Lives); her character Paige is a small town girl who worries about an unplanned pregnancy.
• Ernest Borgnine, who was best known for starring in McHale's Navy, took on the role of a Satanic occult leader in The Devil's Rain in order to push himself out of his comfort zone and play something completely different from what was expected.
  • There's also his breakthrough role in Marty. Before then, Borgnine was typecast as a sneering villain in flicks like From Here to Eternity and Vera Cruz. Afterwards, Borgnine's roles became much more diverse.
• Sharlto Copley, who's previous characters have been nebbish, wacky and non-threatening, plays a hulking, Ax-Crazy, sociopathic enforcer for a tyrannical government in Elysium. And he absolutely owns the role.
• David Faustino is known for playing awkward teenage boys on sitcoms. It's quite a shock to see him as a racist Jerk Jock in the Disney Channel film Perfect Harmony and as the voice of Mako on The Legend of Korra.
• Tyrone Power acquired the rights to Nightmare Alley (1947) precisely so he could play the heartless, unscrupulous lead, as opposed to his usual heroic swashbucklers.
• Will Smith who always plays the badass in action films plays a complete moron in Shark Tale.
• Neve Campbell in the 90s had a habit of playing Shrinking Violet teenage roles (Party of Five, the Scream films etc.). Her character in The Craft starts out the same way - but the power goes to her head, turning her into a Beta Bitch.
• Sarah Michelle Gellar is nearly always the good girl (she is Buffy after all). Her characters always tend to be wholesome anyway. At least until Cruel Intentions where she plays a Rich Bitch who manipulates everyone, tries to seduce her stepbrother and makes out with another girl in public for no good reason. Also around the same time she was filming Buffy season 2, she played two Distressed Damsels in Scream 2 and I Know What You Did Last Summer. And she gets slaughtered in both.
• Rose McGowan is always the Deadpan Snarker. Her role in one of the Grindhouse films (Death Proof) is true to that. But in Planet Terror her character Cherry Darling is a ditzy Action Girl.
• Creed Bratton was a flower power era rock musician whose later acting career culminated in Adam Westing as the sleazy quality control manager on The Office. He did a 180 as the title character's tragically ill uncle in the indie comedy Terri.
• Sigourney Weaver as a Mrs. Robinson? In Heartbreakers yes.
  • Likewise Jason Lee tends to be loud foul-mouthed Manchild characters. In Heartbreakers he's the Only Sane Man.
  • And a three-fer for Heartbreakers. Jennifer Love Hewitt tends to play wholesome characters or else an Innocent Fanservice Girl. She's a straight up Ms. Fanservice in the film - also doubling as a Jerk with a Heart of Gold.
• Kurtwood Smith got his start playing villainous jerkasses like Clarence Boddicker in the original RoboCop (1987) and even when not playing villains, his characters are still abrasive, like Red Foreman. Yet he also played the Federation President in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, a Reasonable Authority Figure.
  • He also played the Anti-Villain in Star Trek: Voyager's "Year of Hell".
• Inverted with Jennifer Garner. Based on her recent work, it's hard to believe that she got started playing Badasses in Alias and Electra.
• In All Monsters Attack, Hideyo Amamoto, who normally played gangsters, henchmen, or otherwise villainous roles, played a fatherly toy maker.
• For those who know Richard Attenborough as John Hammond, Kris Kringle or from heroic military roles like The Great Escape, consider that his Star-Making Role came as vicious gangster Pinkie Brown in Brighton Rock. Or his portrayal of real-life serial killer John Reginald Christie in 10 Rillington Place.
• In Yes Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus (1991), Charles Bronson, known for extremely violent action roles, plays a newspaper writer depressed over the death of his wife, who receives a letter from a little girl asking if Santa Claus is real, and decides to answer it.
• Ben Whishaw as the titular bear in Paddington. He's more known for Shakespeare roles, and playing anti-heroes, than being in family friendly movies.
• Running Scared (1986) stars Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines as Cowboy Cops.
• Cinderella (2015):
  • Cate Blanchett is normally a heroic leading lady, here she's the Wicked Stepmother. She commented on people's reactions when she told them she'd be in the film - as most assumed she meant she was playing the lead even though she'd have been far too old...
  • Helena Bonham Carter takes a break from playing dark nutcases (though the nutcase bit could be debatable!) to play the Fairy Godmother.
  • Sophie McShera had been known as doe-eyed Cute Clumsy Girls in Waterloo Road, Galavant and Downton Abbey (the latter two of which she also played maids). A bullying aristocrat like Drizella is a little different for her.
• John Cusack who would play the Straight Man or Only Sane Man in film plays an egotistical Manchild in Igor.
• Rihanna, she of the sexually charged and/or violence-infused lyrics, copious amounts of marijuana consumption, and topless photo shoots, voices a young girl in Home (2015), a family movie.
• Margaret Hamilton remains most notorious as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, but she normally was a character actress specializing in New England harridans (e.g. her bit part in a Vermont drugstore in Nothing Sacred). The Witch's alter ego in Oz, Miss Gulch, is also clearly a harridan, although she's not from New England.
• Lee Van Cleef was usually typecast as villains until 1965's For a Few Dollars More, which put him in a heroic role to play off Clint Eastwood in an anti-hero role. FAFDM was such a hit that Van Cleef was able to secure a lot of hero roles for the rest of his career. He still returned to his old type from time to time, including, most notably, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Day Of Anger (which plays so fast and loose with this trope regarding him, it's hard to tell what kind of subversion he pulled off), and Kid Vengeance, but FAFDM marked a notable 180 in his character type.
• It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was a rare foray into slapstick for Ethel Merman, and also one of her few non-singing appearances in anything.
• Owen Wilson, who always played a laid-back character, plays a cynical sociopath in Free Birds.
• Jai Courtney was previously known as Varo, quite possibly the only genuine Nice Guy in Spartacus: Blood and Sand. So in Divergent he's playing Drill Sergeant Nasty Eric.
• Blake Lively, known as a variation of Everyone Loves Blondes or otherwise perky seductresses, really shocked critics with The Age of Adaline. She plays a woman that never ages and has lived a hundred years watching various friends and lovers dying around her. Earlier in her career she also played a coke-sniffing con woman in Hick as well as a trashy alcoholic in The Town.
• Sisters has Tina Fey as a hot-tempered, foul-mouthed woman who hasn't really progressed from her days as a partying teenager, while Amy Poehler is the neurotic, nerdy character you usually would expect Fey to play. In fact, it's been said that the two of them basically swapped their roles from Baby Mama.
• Channing Tatum has been best known to audiences as meatheads, romantic leads or lovable Dumb Muscle types. He has however played around with those images in a few films:
  • A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints had him as an abused Manchild who gets into fights and eventually goes to prison by clubbing a teenager to death.
  • Stop-Loss and Foxcatcher show him resenting his Dumb Muscle status in comparison to his more talented and respected peers.
  • The Hateful Eight as a sociopathic monster.
  • Hail, Caesar! initially looks like it's playing to his type, by casting him as a Gene Kelly-esque dance star of ambiguous sexuality, and indeed, his dance scene is as spectacular as you'd hope. But then he turns out to be a Soviet spy.
• Keira Knightley tends to be a Spirited Young Lady in various period dramas, but went radically against type as a ditzy pothead in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. To a lesser extent she had a smaller role in Everest as the protagonist's concerned wife (complete with fake New Zealand accent) in an ensemble drama, and in The Nutcracker and the Four Realms she played the Sugar Plum Fairy as a Manipulative Bitch.
• When Jessica Biel heard that Liv Tyler had dropped out of The Illusionist (2006), she decided to take action. Best known for playing Ms. Fanservice or Action Girl parts, she drove to the audition in full 19th century costume to convince them to cast her. She won the part of an Austrian duchess and critics were stunned.
• Lily James typically plays the English Rose or The Ingenue in Period Piece Costume Dramas. Baby Driver is her first major onscreen role where she portrays a Fake American waitress in a non-period drama film.
• The 2010 film The Perfect Host gave David Hyde Pierce the unusual opportunity to play against type as a very disturbed nutball while simultaneously sending up the stuffy upper-class twit roles he's best known for.
• Fans of Vincent Price's horror movie career will be surprised by his role in 1944's Laura. Far from the creepy-yet-sophisticated, Mid-Atlantic-accented character of his later-career typecasting, here he plays a gold-digging country bumpkin who speaks in a southern drawl not far from Price's native Midwestern accent. (The character hails from Kentucky, whereas Price himself was born not so far away in Saint Louis, Missouri.)
• In Unfaithfully Yours, Rudy Vallee, one of the most famous crooners of Hollywood's golden age, plays the conductor main character's brother-in-law—who hates music.
• The music video for Stolen City's "Faces" features Irish actor John Duggan - best known as either cops or hardasses - as the protagonist's caring father.
• Logan Lucky: The lead actors are new to the kind of situational comedy displayed in the film.
  • Daniel Craig plays what is probably his first overtly comedic movie role, Joe Bang, a wacky redneck Demolitions Expert. Pretty far from his usually serious roles and James Bond.
  • Ditto for Channing Tatum and Adam Driver.
• Peter Boyle (see Live-Action TV) played the father of Billy Bob Thornton's character in Monster's Ball. It's a chilling performance as an irredeemable racist, a world away from Frank Barone.
• Owen Wilson, who usually portrays the role of someone mellow or friendly, plays the mean nurse Neil King in The Wendell Baker Story.
• Tichina Arnold is normally a comedic actress best known for sitcom roles like Pam from Martin and Rochelle from Everybody Hates Chris. In 2008 however, she played the title character in The Lena Baker Story, which is about the 1945 execution of a black housekeeper who killed her white employer when he tried to rape her, but the all-white-male jury convicted her of capital murder anyway. The movie is every bit as humorous as it sounds.
• In Platoon, Oliver Stone intentionally cast Tom Berenger, who mostly played good guys, as the ruthless, sadistic Sgt. Barnes and Willem Dafoe, who primarily played villains, as the heroic, compassionate Sgt. Elias. The casting worked and both of them received Oscar nominations for their roles.
• Cameron Diaz portrays a homely woman who later on falls in love with another woman in Being John Malkovich.
• Paul Rudd
  • His character Cactus/Bill in Mute. He usually plays comedic goofballs, and at first, it looks like he might be playing a Jerk with a Heart of Gold who performs surgery for the mob to make money to raise his daughter, and that he might help the main character out by helping him find his missing girlfriend. Then it turns out that the girlfriend is the mother of Cactus's daughter, and he killed her so that he could keep her take her to the U.S. with him, so he's been the antagonist all along.
  • His role as Moe Berg in The Catcher Was a Spy is uncharacteristically serious, playing a very withdrawn man who lives in the closet due to being gay in the early 20th Century.
• Jack Black is famously known for playing obnoxious loud mouths in over the top comedies but...:
  • In King Kong (2005), he plays Carl Denham, an ambitious, and extremely amoral filmmaker.
  • In Bernie (2011), he plays a kind Christian funeral director who sings gospel music and is beloved all in his small Texas town despite killing someone. Some of Black's hammier qualities still show up when Bernie sings, which just serves to make him seem like a shy, reserved person who also happens to be really into performing.
    • Ironically enough, that film was directed by Richard Linklater, who previously worked with Black on the comedy School of Rock.
• Cloud Atlas: You could make arguments for a lot of parts actors play in the movie. Seeing Tom Hanks playing characters as sleazy, or downright villainous, as the Hotel Manager, Dr. Henry Goose and Dermot Hoggins is a delightful surprise. Hugh Grant plays both a Corrupt Corporate Executive and a cannibal tribesman.
• Rosita was made specifically because Mary Pickford was only ever type-casted as cute, Plucky Girl children. She wanted to play an adult role for once, so she decided to act in a film based off of the historical novel Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall. The director didn't want to adapt that, so she instead wanted to do Faust. However, Mary's own mother made her quit that one because it was too graphic. They ended up adapting a French play where Mary Pickford plays a dancer named Rosita who becomes the mistress of a king. Rosita ended up very successful despite it being so odd for Pickford, however a few years later Pickford turned against the film and dubbed it a "famous failure" (despite it making over a 1 million USD in 1920s money). Speculation is that Mary herself disliked the film precisely because it went against type. When Mary attempted to break type again in the 1930s, her career fell down the wayside.
• Brad Dourif, Hollywood's go-to guy if you need a psychopath or off-kilter character, in a very rare comedic role as the well-meaning but not too bright cop in Amos and Andrew.
• Eddie Redmayne usually plays adorkable, socially awkward nice guys....except in Hick, where he is a creepy (and possibly rapist) cowboy. There's also his role as the mood-swinging, utterly unhinged Evil Overlord Balem Abrasax in Jupiter Ascending.
• Thanks to a "Freaky Friday" Flip, all of the leads do this in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, since they're playing high school kids in adult bodies. You've got Dwayne Johnson as a cowardly germophobe, Kevin Hart as a (formerly) tall athlete, Karen Gillan as an introverted nerd, and Jack Black as a phoneaholic teenage girl.
  • Similarly, Central Intelligence had "The Rock" and Hart doing dissimilar characters (not only from their typecasts, but from their present selves) in their youth: Johnson was an overweight nerd while Hart played the jock character.
• Ben Mendelsohn is known for playing smug and overconfident villain types. Examples include Orson Krennic in Rogue One, Nolan Sorrento in Ready Player One, Dagget in The Dark Knight Rises and Skrull leader Talos in Captain Marvel (2019). That last one is a subversion, though, as the supposedly villainous Talos turns out to be Good All Along.
• Jackie Earle Haley, who is better known for playing various creeps and weirdos, as the goofy hippie Dukes in Semi-Pro.
• Dan Stevens usually appears in period piece dramas made in Britain or America. He's also taken on other roles to shed him of his image as Matthew Crawley in Downton Abbey such as morally ambiguous characters in The Guest and A Walk Among the Tombstones or a flamboyant Russian singer in Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.
• Robert Carradine is best known for playing nerds or the dad. In Body Bags he's a serial killer armed with a machete and sledge hammer.
• Violet & Daisy: James Gandolfini plays a kind man who deliberately got a hit put out against him after robbing a gang, a very different role from the ones he usually played.
• Knives Out:
  • Chris Evans, best known for playing Ideal Hero Captain America in the MCU, plays the loutish and foulmouthed Black Sheep of the Thrombey family who turns out to have been the villain, who has a severe case of Evil Cannot Comprehend Good to boot.
  • Michael Shannon, who usually plays unstable and intimidating authority figures, plays the petulant, pathetic weakling Walt.
  • Ana de Armas usually plays a Ms. Fanservice, but here she plays a Chaste Heroine.
  • M. Emmett Walsh, who normally plays sleazy and villainous characters, plays an elderly and amiable security guard.
  • Jaeden Martell, best known for playing All-Loving Hero Bill Denbrough, plays a Jerkass alt-right G.I.F.T. troll.
  • Daniel Craig, who made a name for himself playing one of the most serious and intense versions of James Bond to date, and was otherwise known for pretty dramatic roles leading up to that, plays a quirky and affable detective with a jaunty Kentucky accent, a role that gets even more quirky and comedic in the sequel.
• Billy Zane as the titular superhero in The Phantom (1996). At this point in his career, he was mostly known for playing creeps, or villains. Or villainous creeps.
• In Villains Bill Skarsgård, who normally plays psychos and villains, plays an Adorkable Stupid Crook who risks his life to save a little girl from a pair of dangerous psychopaths.
• In Switchback, Danny Glover plays a serial killer.
• Walter Matthau, the cantankerous Jewish-American comedic actor plays a swashbuckling pirate captain in Pirates.
• Ariel Winter is known for playing sweetheart characters, such as the title character of Sofia the First and Marina from Jake And The Neverland Pirates, so it's pretty surprising that she voiced Chrissy Damon, a Spoiled Brat who sings a shockingly inappropriate song for a girl her age in Scooby-Doo! Stage Fright.
• Prior to her Academy Award winning turn as a prostitute in Elmer Gantry, Shirley Jones was primarily known for playing sweet, wholesome good girls in musicals like Carousel, The Music Man, and Oklahoma!.
• John Wayne was famous for playing rugged yet honorable Western heroes, and to many exemplifies the archetypical "white hat" good guy. In The Searchers he plays the ruthless Anti-Hero Ethan Edwards, who despite appearing on the outset to be a typical Wayne hero is gradually revealed to be deeply morally compromised and mentally unstable. He is implied to be a criminal, he is strongly implied to be in love with his brother's wife (and may be the true father to his niece), he shoots men in the back and shoots at retreating enemies, he slaughters buffalo to deprive the Commanche of food, he scalps a Commanche war chief, he is openly racist and dismissive towards his part-Indian adoptive nephew, and worst of all he spends most of the movie planning to murder his 14-year-old niece, who has been abducted by the Commanche and assimilated into their culture. It is widely regarded as the greatest role of his career and his very best performance, and it is his personal favorite.
  • To say nothing of playing Genghis Khan in The Conqueror.
• Quicksand is a 1950 American Film Noir that stars Mickey Rooney and portrays a garage mechanic's descent into crime. The film provided Rooney with an opportunity to play against type, performing in a role starkly different from his earlier role as the innocent "nice guy" in MGM's popular Andy Hardy film series.
• While the less well-known, but polite actor Michael E. Rodgers is known to star in some non-kids' films and TV shows, he ended up playing a fun-loving, lazy, humorous, nice, and cheerful cousin to Mr. Conductor in the children's film Thomas and the Magic Railroad, and he had a lot of fun making it. He also tried voice acting, voicing in a few video games as villanous characters.
• Melanie Scrofano is best known for her role as the eponymous Action Girl Gunslinger protagonist of the Urban Fantasy series Wynonna Earp. In Ready or Not (2019), however, she plays Emilie Le Domas, a ditzy, coked-up heiress who is the subject of a Running Gag concerning her absolutely dreadful marksmanship, in which she keeps accidentally shooting the maids to the point that the rest of the family eventually prohibits her from carrying any guns.
• John Waters (1948) had played dramatic roles before, but to the target audience of The Real Macaw and their parents, he was likely best known for hosting Play School for nearly twenty years. In that sense, his role as a greedy museum curator who Would Hurt a Child was quite the departure.
• Steve Buscemi, best known for playing criminals and low-lifes, played the dorky and harmless Nice Guy Donnie in The Big Lebowski. He also played a Hero Antagonist in Animal Factory, though the character was still something of a Jerkass. In Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams, he plays a timid Mad Scientist who turns out to be Good All Along.
• The 2021 Irish film Spears:
  • Bobby Calloway is either villains, Cloud Cuckoo Landers or else stoic soldiers. He plays Jeff, who's The Charmer and relies on manipulation and duplicity in comparison to the more action-oriented Cormac. He's also the only one of the protagonists who objects to harming people for revenge.
  • Rebecca Rose Flynn was known for the dramatic Girl Next Door roles, or else the Genki Girl protagonist of The Gumdrops (itself against type for her). She plays Rachel - a mysterious Femme Fatale.
• Malcolm McDowell is best known for Antihero roles such as Alex Delarge or Scene Chewing Villains whom you just Love to Hate. Even in non-villanous roles, his characters still typically ooze irony and Black Comedy. However, in the 1976 WWI war drama film Aces High, he portrayed a Stoic Woobie air force major who was tortured by the thought of the young pilots he had to send into war. Ironically, his first major Hollywood role was an owlish, good natured H.G. Wells in Time After Time. The actor also notes that when he was cast in the role of a racist South African police chief in Morgan Freeman's 1993 film Bopha (a role he took because he was excited about opportunity to work with Morgan Freeman), he acknowledged the social issues central to the film's theme, thus, out of respect for the material, he acted the role in a more "no-nonsense" manner than his fans are used to seeing.
• Bob Odenkirk spent the first thirty five years of his career as a comedy writer and actor and barely worked out at all. He then spent two years intensively training so he could convincingly play a Retired Badass who goes on a rampage in Nobody, doing a lot of the fight scenes and stunts himself.
  • Christopher Lloyd, also known for a long career as a comic actor, also gets to have some fun as Hutch's Retired Badass father.
• Tris Coffin, best known for his black hat roles in old Westerns, plays a jetpack-wielding superhero in King of the Rocket Men.
• Hero or villain, Lee Van Cleef's characters were usually the confident, focused type. In The Bravados, his character, Alfonso Parral, was a pathetic, desperate thug.
• Paul Henreid, usually cast as a romantic lead, decided to produce Hollow Triumph himself, so that he could play a bad guy for once.
• Jim Varney, best known as the lovable and family-friendly character Ernest P. Worrell, plays a violent, incestuous alcoholic in the 1997 film 100 Proof.
• Perhaps similar to Shirley Jones in Elmer Gantry, Elisabeth Shue prior to her own Academy Award nominated portrayal of a prostitute in Leaving Las Vegas, was primarily known for playing nice, wholesome Girl Next Door types of a virtuous attribute.
• Tiffany Haddish, usually known for raunchy comedies, was cast in a dramatic role in the 2021 Paul Schrader film The Card Counter. Her performance as kindhearted gambler La Linda, who hires and falls in love with the broken lead played by Oscar Isaac, was critically acclaimed.
• AnnaLynne McCord, a blonde bombshell known for playing Alpha Bitch roles when she was younger and Femme Fatale roles when she grew up, also starred in Excision (2012) as Pauline, a dowdy teenage outcast with all manner of freaky, twisted thoughts whose growing insanity eventually causes her to kill her Delicate and Sickly sister in a delusional attempt to cure her illness. And she is terrifying.
• Tom Arnold is best known for his comedic roles, making his roles as a prison rapist in Animal Factory and a child molester in Gardens Of The Night a shock, especially since he pulls them off chillingly well.
• Thanks to his appearance giving him a perpetual Death Glare, Amrish Puri got typecast into villainous roles (most famously outside of India as the evil Thuggee priest Mola Ram in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). In Gandhi, he plays Dada Abdullah Hajee Adab, president of the Natal Indian Congress who demanded equal rights for Indians in South Africa and who was a mentor and ally of Mahatma Gandhi's.
• The late Bruce Forsyth, best known for being a British TV presenter and family entertainer, did this when he portrayed villainous spiv Swinburne in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, which is quite a contrast from his best known duties.
• Glenn Howerton is best known for being Dennis Reynolds, who is at least Faux Affably Evil enough to be endearing no matter how outlandish his schemes and ego get. In BlackBerry, about the eponymous smartphone, he plays Research In Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie, coming across as a completely unlikable Jerkass Corrupt Corporate Executive who ultimately resigned from the company after engaging in high-level stock fraud to attract talented engineers from all over the world. And unlike Dennis, there’s no shred of irony in anything he does.
• Nick Offerman, best known for playing hardcore libertarian Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation, plays an authoritarian dictatorial President Evil in Civil War (2024).

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