Typecasting / Actors

A-D

• Even before Dean Winchester (who is the ultimate of this character type), Jensen Ackles always seemed to play snarky, slightly dangerous woobies with massive family issues. See Smallville one year earlier, and Dark Angel before that.
• Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje is typecast as an African. He has a British accent, but he always performs with a Nigerian accent, apparently off of the success of his breakout role as Adebisi in Oz.
• When Alan Alda started playing villains, it was an example of Playing Against Type. Over time, they've arguably become his type.
• Comedian Dave Allen has a knack for playing teachers or guidance counselors, including his roles in Freaks and Geeks, Malcolm in the Middle, Frasier, Star vs. the Forces of Evil and others.
• Woody Allen as a neurotic, aging womanizer. This is mostly self-inflicted.
• Do you have a foreign guy in your script? If so, then Armand Assante is your man. No matter which country the character is from, Assante will bring foreignness to the role. He's played his share of red-meat eating, quick-fisted New York tough guys, but such roles have either been forgotten (Mike Hammer in I, The Jury) or execrable (Rico in Judge Dredd).
• British character actor Harry Andrews was typically cast as a tough military officer or some other no-nonsense, often intimidating authority figure.
• Starting with Ghostbusters (1984) and Die Hard, William Atherton always seems to play jerks who audiences love to hate — not quite villains, but frequent pains in the ass who get in the heroes' way and make their jobs harder, most often some form of Obstructive Bureaucrat.
• Rowan Atkinson playing a royal advisor in The Lion King (1994) is similar to his role as Edmund Blackadder in Blackadder the Third.
• Adam Baldwin is the Don Draper of the nineties: the scowling, growling ass-kicking man's man. Also The Big Guy (6'4" 240lbs.) He's overwhelmingly some military man; or if ex-military, is a merc or a cop. Usually a cold-blooded killer. Oftentimes The Mole, and almost always a Deadpan Snarker with a Death Glare of his own. If his characters political beliefs are important, they are overwhelmingly Republican (a detail he often insists on, as he is proudly and loudly Republican in Real Life). Notable roles include Firefly, Serenity, Angel, Chuck, Full Metal Jacket, Independence Day and The Last Ship.
• Antonio Banderas is always a Dashing Hispanic.
• Tobin Bell is becoming a career villain very quickly, and is now almost universally known as Jigsaw. Even in a bit part on an episode of Seinfeld, he manages to be some sort of antagonist.
• Christian Berkel seems to be in a similar predicament as fellow German actor Thomas Kretschmann, though to a lesser extent. He's played a German officer (alternating between Nazis and sympathetic Germans) in Downfall, Valkyrie, Zwartboek, Miracle At St. Anna, and Leningrad. He also made an appearance in Inglourious Basterds, although there he's just a French bartender catering to Germans.
• Ralph Bellamy was often stuck playing dull nice guys.
• Michael Biehn gets a lot of roles as intense military types — a cadet in The Lords of Discipline, a resistance fighter in The Terminator, a Colonial Marine in Aliens, the player avatar in Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, and a Navy SEAL in no less than 3 films — Navy SEALS, The Abyss and The Rock.
• Jack Black's been known for playing either a hyperactive maniac Large Ham role or a slob. Except in The Holiday.
• BRIAN BLESSED is always cast is big, boisterous characters who shout a lot. NOBODY REALLY KNOWS WHY!
• Most of Orlando Bloom's major roles have been in historical/fantasy action/swashbuckling movies such as The Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, Troy, Kingdom of Heaven, The Hobbit and The Three Musketeers.
• Sean Bean often plays characters that get killed or never get what they want. Most enter villain or Token Evil Teammate territory. The general rule of thumb is that if the film is in a historical, medieval or fantasy setting, he'll play one of the good guys... who dies (The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Black Death, and Game of Thrones). If it's set in modern times, he'll generally play one of the bad guys... and usually die. When he survives, it's typically as a regular badass, such as his Star-Making Role in the Sharpe series (where he's practically a Napoleonic War's James Bond), Odysseus in Troy, and a general in Pixels. Except Flightplan (2005), where he's just a pilot, or Ronin (1998), where he's a fraud.
• William Boyett, best known as Sgt. McDonald on Adam-12, had also played police officers in several TV series (e.g., Highway Patrol) or in film (e.g., Last Clear Chance).
• Peter Boyle had his Star-Making Role playing a Politically Incorrect Hero in Joe (1970). Though Boyle was disturbed by the film's Misaimed Fandom, he spent most of his career playing similar characters: a grouchy hitman in The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a bigoted cabbie in Taxi Driver, a racist cop in Malcolm X, an aged bigot in Monster's Ball and Joe McCarthy in the TV movie Tail Gunner Joe. Even Boyle's most famous comedy role, Frank on Everybody Loves Raymond, is a more benign version of his typecasting. That said, Young Frankenstein is nothing if not an aversion.
• Karan Brar (who, granted, isn't in that much yet) will typically play the Indian Funny Foreigner child. See Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Jessie.
• David Bradley (Argus Filch, Walder Frey) seems to be the UK's go-to actor for unpleasant old men.
• Wilford Brimley was often cast as a grouchy but lovable and wise grandfathers or grandfatherly figures (even when he was still in his 40s or 50s), e.g. Cocoon (and its sequel), The Stone Boy, Star Wars: Ewok Adventures, and many others.
• Charles Bronson was the ultimate badass. Apparently, this extended to his offscreen life, too: he was a coal miner at the age of 10. In The Magnificent Seven, Bronson splits wood onscreen, with an axe and everything, like his character's Seven Samurai counterpart Heihachi. Not only is this physically demanding, requiring good coordination, it's so dangerous that no insurance company is likely to ever let a name star do that again.
• Before being cast as Bond, Pierce Brosnan was typecast as the Romantic False Lead, a handsome cad whom the other male loves to hate. (Robin Williams nearly murdered him.)
• Whether animated or live action, Clancy Brown almost always seems to end up playing a villain. Probably the nicest character he's known for playing is Mr. Krabs, who is still a greedy douchebag.
• If you need an Obama impersonator on your show, then Reggie Brown's your guy.
• Richard Burton was often cast as a troubled priest struggling with his faith and with morality, e.g. Becket, The Night of the Iguana, Exorcist II: The Heretic, and Absolution. His role in Equus, while a psychiatrist rather than a priest, is of a similar nature, since his character makes an analogy between his role as a child psychiatrist today and the roles of holy men in ancient times.
• Steve Buscemi playing the paranoid, fast-talking, nervy rodenty guy who is either a snarky, Jerkass, loserish protagonist or a sympathetic, loserish scumbag of a villain / Anti-Villain. Sometimes voice-acts actual rodents. Due to this characterization, he has a low chance of surviving until the end of a movie.
• Gary Busey has made a career out of playing bad guys with various levels of mental derangement - from mild sociopathy to full-on Ax-Crazy. Busey admits that some of this is due to how he would act when the cameras weren't rolling.
• Gary Busey's son Jake Busey, who looks rather similar to his dad, gets his fair share of the kinds of roles his dad gets (for example, in Contact, The Frighteners, and Tomcats.)
• James "Jimmy" Cagney, far down on the list, but among the first and most severe cases of typecasting in early Hollywood. Since smashing a grapefruit in Mae Clarke's face in The Public Enemy (1931), he will be forever known as the hardass gangster, complete with his own Beam Me Up, Scotty!, "You dirty rat..." Cagney started his career as a "hoofer" or dancer in stage musicals, was a teetotaler, spoke fluent yiddish (though a gentile), and was no slouch at judo (put to great use in Blood on the Sun (1945), with one of the most brutal fights ever filmed). Yet none of this erased the tough guy persona he was famous for, even after winning an Oscar for the musical Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). Part of the problem was that Cagney couldn't flash a smile that didn't imply Godless bloodlust. (He turned down Humphrey Bogart's Star-Making Role in High Sierra in order to get away from the typecasting).
• Bruce Campbell has played so many jerks spouting one-liners that most fans don't know what to think when he tries something new.
• Jay Jackson is an American actor who only ever plays the role of a News Anchor or Newscaster. He has done so on Dexter, The Closer, The Mentalist, Scandal, Body of Proof, Fred: The Show and Parks and Recreation.
  • According to Jackson, this is self-imposed; he's a semi-retired news anchor with no background in acting, and his first "acting" role was largely gained through a fluke. Even today, he doesn't think of himself as an actor; his real passion is jazz music.
• John Candy always tended to play well-meaning but bumbling types. The Bumbling Dad, the Cool Uncle, the semi-ineffectual cop with a heart of gold. Interesting enough, the role most people say was his best was a corrupt, utterly unpleasant and unlikeable, southern lawyer in JFK.
• Since becoming an A-list actor, only three movies Jim Carrey has starred in aren't comedies in some way: The Majestic, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Number 23. (The Truman Show is a dark satire, his role in Batman Forever is comedic, and Man on the Moon is a Biopic of Andy Kaufman, so all of them have a comic element.)
• Can you say Michael Cera? Ever since Arrested Development ended, he's been typecast as the skinny, awkwardly sweet kid that falls in love with a quirky girl in all his films. Though he seems to be playing against type in Youth in Revolt^note Skinny, awkwardly sweet kid, with a skinny TOTAL MENACE alter ego and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World... Sorta.
• A large number of Garry Chalk's live action roles has him working for the government. These includes jobs in politics, S.H.I.E.L.D., military and most frequently, a police officer.
• Jackie Chan was typecast as a "nice guy" for decades, partly because Jackie aspired to be a positive role model for children. Until 2006's "Rob B Hood", Jackie hadn't played a negative character in over 30 years.
• Roy Cheung plays a lot of psychotic Triad gangsters and other villains in Hong Kong movies, to the point that when he played a Shaolin monk in Infernal Affairs, it was seen as Playing Against Type.
• Chow Yun-fat is good at playing tragic heroes in Hong Kong action movies. Since his work with John Woo, nearly every gunplay role he plays has him using two guns at least once in the movie.
  • ... and game.
• Until he played Asterix, Thénardier and Napoleon, Christian Clavier often played a nervous wreck finding himself in slapstick, if not outright Butt-Monkey, situations. Half the time it's a Nouveau Riche. Since about 2014 with Serial (Bad) Weddings (Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait au Bon Dieu?), he invariably plays French Old Money characters the movies make fun of for being slightly chauvinistic (or denying they are).
• John Cleese is......... well, John Cleese in pretty much every movie he's in. He often says "Jolly good" or "Marvellous".
• Kim Coates as the unsettling/creepy/psychotic/pervy villain. It's a reasonable bet that even if his character isn't obviously evil straightaway, his villainy will be revealed before very long.
• Lee J. Cobb often played angry, overbearing, and hostile people, e.g. vindictive juror #3 in 12 Angry Men, the corrupt mob boss Johnny Friendly in On the Waterfront, belligerent drunk Fyodor Karamazov in a film adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov, and several others.
• Gary Coleman as the wisecracking black kid. See also Adam Westing.
• Jeffrey Combs has made a career out of playing psychopaths and Star Trek characters. Peter Jackson specifically sought him out for The Frighteners because of his role in the Re-Animator series.
• Sean Connery took a while to escape James Bond—even outside the franchise, many of his roles allude to it.
• Every role Bradley Cooper has done post-Alias has been a Jerkass or Chivalrous Pervert (or combination of the two) who always has an occasion to remove his shirt. Averted from Silver Linings Playbook on, in which he managed to break out of his type and get nominated for an Oscar.
• The popularity of Steptoe and Son ruined the careers of its stars, Harry H. Corbett and Wilfrid Brambell. Corbett in particular suffered, having achieved acclaim as a Shakespearean actor before accepting his role in the show, and frequently being described as "Britain's Marlon Brando" early in his career.
• Peter Coyote is habitually an asshole authority figure, but with a certain grace and style. Even when the role offers him little to do but whinge about protocol, you can keenly understand why he's in command.
• Tom Cruise always seems to play a Jerk with a Heart of Gold or a Loveable Rogue who learns how to truly love.
  • And with his Mission: Impossible Film Series rebounding in popularity, you can also find the Cruiser putting the action in action hero, doing his own running, climbing, shooting, running, fighting, running, driving and running...
• Even stage actors aren't immune to this. Look at John Cullum, playing a cynical, worldwise, southerner and/or father, in Shenandoah (original cast and revival), 1776 (movie), Urinetown, and 110 in the Shade. Ironically, he initially turned down the role of Rutledge because he did not want to play a southerner.
• Tim Curry almost always plays sly villains, to his chagrin. He's stated multiple times that The Rocky Horror Picture Show pretty much killed his career.
• Andy Dick tends to often play a Cloudcuckoolander and/or The Fool and/or a Wacky Guy.
• Vincent D'Onofrio, after Full Metal Jacket, generally plays a big, scary guy. In Men in Black, he plays a perfectly sane (wife-beating redneck) farmer who gets eaten and his skin worn by a creepy bug alien about sixty seconds into his first scene. Wilson Fisk from Daredevil (2015) is self-explanatory. And even on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Bobby Goren is impliedly a little off.
• Willem Dafoe always plays more subtle psychos who are the Evil Chancellor or Corrupt Corporate Executive with a hidden side. Less passive-agression, more grinning!
  • When he's a good guy he tends to be a Reasonable Authority Figure, such as his breakout role as Sgt. Elias. Examples include an FBI agent, a CIA agent and a NYPD cop.
  • Exceptions include The Last Temptation of Christ and Antichrist.
• New Zealander Alan Dale keeps turning up as evil American businessmen or politicians.
  • Or a Romulan...
• Matt Damon is often a Designated Monkey Played for Drama with attributes similar to a typical Tom Cruise role.
• Rodney Dangerfield had played the same act in most movies he did the past couple of decades, with the possible darker exception of Natural Born Killers.
• Whenever people think of Anthony Daniels, C-3PO is the role that defines a majority of his career.
• John de Lancie usually finds himself in roles that can be best summed up as "annoying guy that is a pain in the neck to the protagonist(s)". Examples are in Star Trek The Next Generation where he took the role of Q, an all-powerful being that usually likes to mess around with the crew of the Enterprise much to their annoyance, and in My Little Pony where he does largely the same thing except this time as Discord. Star Gate also features him as Frank Simmons, a guy with an agenda that usually causes him to butt heads with Stargate Command.
• Anthony De Longis provides the voice for several Jerkass video game villains, including Mick Cutler in Resistance 3 and General Sarrano in Bulletstorm.
• Robert De Niro almost always plays tough, confident and aggressive types with a blue-collar or lower-class background. In the last decade, he's become more and more prone to Adam Westing his badass image than playing straight examples.
• Brian Dennehy was often cast as a policeman, e.g. First Blood, Gorky Park, Hap and Leonard, etc.
• Danny DeVito is the sleazy scumbag character, sometimes with a Heart of Gold.
• The only constant between Johnny Depp's roles is that, with the exception of Pirates of the Caribbean (being a sequel), he hasn't done the same kind of character twice. And in that strange way, audiences have come to expect him to just be that kind of quirky, offbeat character.
  • Frequently pairing up with Tim Burton tends to do that.
  • He specifically avoided being typecast as a Teen Idol after 21 Jump Street.
  • He's done plenty of quirky man-child characters, though the quirks tend to shift quite a bit from movie to movie.
• Leonardo DiCaprio is an interesting example. After his Star-Making Role in Titanic (1997), media pundits almost unanimously predicted that Leo would be another flash-in-the pan celebrity, typecast as a Bishōnen teenage heart-throb before forever vanishing from the limelight after hitting 35. Unusually, he was smart enough to move away from pretty boy roles into something grittier and started a very fruitful creative partnership with Martin Scorsese. Ironically, this led DiCaprio to being typecast in crime and/or business dramas, Scorsese's signature genre, where he usually plays intense, morally ambiguous types. Leo's lead role as Dominic Cobb in Inception was seen as an attempt at broadening his acting range... right until it turned out he was playing an intense, morally ambiguous mind thief.
• A truly extreme and bizarre example is East German actor Fritz Diez (1901 -1979). He played the same character over and over in about two dozen films, TV features, and stage plays. And the character was... Adolf Hitler.
• Vin Diesel is the tough action hero who, appropriately, has something to do with big hulking machines.
• In the 1960s and 70s there was the great Anton Diffring, who became the archetypal sinister German officer. For a period during the 1960s no self-respecting WWII film was complete without an icy glare or cold and calculating remark courtesy of Herr Diffring (Operation Crossbow and Where Eagles Dare being two notable examples). He even played bigwigs like Reinhard Heydrich in Operation Daybreak and Joachim Von Ribbentrop in The Winds of War.
• Jason Dolley, a member of the Disney Channel repertoire, is typecast as two different types of characters: Either an unlucky, unappreciated loser who gets the girl in the end (in his three Disney Channel original movies: Read It and Weep, Minutemen, and Hatching Pete): or a moronic, slacker musician (in his two Disney Channel sitcoms, Cory in the House and Good Luck Charlie).
  • He's finally due to play a moronic, slacker musician in a DCOM for a change, when the Good Luck Charlie movie is released.
• Brad Dourif. You've never heard his name, but if you've ever watched a sci-fi show or horror movie with a creepy-looking dude with scary, intense, and oddly woobieish eyes, you know who he is. If you have ever seen The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and been oddly compelled to hug the traitorous Grí­ma Wormtongue, you know who he is. If you have ever played Myst III: Exile and sobbed your damn heart out over Saavedro's plight, then you definitely know who he is.
  • And his voice has likely haunted your nightmares from childhood.
  • He escape his typecasting in Deadwood, where he played the town's jerkish Frontier Doctor who cares deeply about helping the people.
  (Local prostitutes are giggling while being "examined" by the doctor.)
  Doc Cochran: When you laugh, you leak piss.
  • His typecasting is Lampshaded in Urban Legend, where he plays a scary, stuttering gas station attendant. He runs up to a girl getting gas trying to yell something, but he Can't Spit It Out. She shakes him off and drives away in her car, assuming he was trying to attack and/or rape her. After she's out of earshot, he finally manages to shout "SOMEONE'S IN THE BACK SEAT!" Much later in the movie, he's mentioned on the news as a suspect in the murders.
• Robert Downey Jr. has managed a significant career comeback by playing brilliant substance abusers: Iron Man, Zodiac (2007), and Sherlock Holmes (2009).
• Frenchman Émile Drain holds the record for portraying Napoléon Bonaparte the most — ten times in total, in French and American films alike, from 1921 to 1953.
• Richard Dysart was frequently cast as a medical doctor or a scientist, e.g. Dr. Copper in The Thing (1982), Dr. Allenby in Being There, Dr. Ellis in The Terminal Man, and many others.

E-L

• Clint Eastwood was known for tough cowboy or cop roles.
  • Harry Callahan grew old and changed his name to Walter Kowalski. He directed that movie. He actually typecast himself.
  • He also cast himself in Unforgiven, where he plays an older version of his tough cowboy character. Clint likes to do this - and he knows what he's doing.
  • Now he's just known for playing "the character with the gravely voice".
  • Possibly the only exception is Every Which Way But Loose and its sequel Any Which Way You Can, which were off-beat comedies. Though even then his character was a tough guy trucker who dabbles in bare-knuckle fighting.
• Christopher Eccleston did get somewhat typecast over the years: either as a troubled, working-class, underdog everyman with some tragic story (Jude, Let Him Have It, Flesh and Blood, Strumpet, Revengers Tragedy, Our Friends in the North Hillsborough, The Second Coming, Heroes... even the Ninth Doctor fits this, at least stylistically), or as a mostly blockbuster-style villain (Gone In Sixty Seconds, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, The Seeker, Elizabeth). The former because of activism and conviction; the latter to be able to take a badly paying theatre role once in a while. Still, when The Agony Booth wrote about his role in the admittedly awful The Seeker "You're Christopher Eccleston. You're practically synonymous with having a charming and likeable screen presence. There is absolutely nothing scary about you.", the reviewer clearly had never seen 28 Days Later, Shallow Grave or his Iago in Othello.
• Sam Elliott, please pick up the white courtesy phone. A movie needs a wise, grizzled cowboy. Parodied with his role in The Big Lebowski. Note that this is an archetype he's had to age into; he's quite unrecognizable as a hip, young, and smooth-faced wildlife photographer in Frogs.
• Michael Emerson has made a career out of playing villains — to the point where he had to insist that his next role after Lost will be something other than a villain, preferably a comedy protagonist — but at least he varies it a little. First he was Ax-Crazy Serial Killer William Hinks on The Practice, then he was Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain and "The Mozart of telekinesis" Oliver Martin in The X-Files episode "Sunshine Days", then he was Magnificent Bastard Ben Linus on Lost. Then Ben suffered massive Villain Decay and became The Woobie in the last season. (He's not playing a villain on Person of Interest.)
• When he's not lending his voice to video game characters, Gideon Emery tends to be cast as criminals or other seedy people- who usually end up dying.
• R. Lee Ermey's entire career is being Drill Sergeant Nasty. Even in documentary shows he still plays Gunnery Sgt. Hartman.
  • In Willard, Ermey broke ranks to play a Corrupt Corporate Executive instead... but he still acted like Drill Sergeant Nasty in the role.
  • Ermey himself seems to recognize this to the point where he spoofed his own Full Metal Jacket role in The Frighteners.
    • Ermey plays a very racist police officer in the movie Life.
    • R. Lee Ermey was a Drill Sergeant Nasty during the Vietnam war. Gunnery Sergeant Hartman is only a slight exaggeration of the way he, and most other drill sergeants, actually behaved at that time. Modern drill instructors are much less over-the-top than back then.
  • Ermey has played an evangelist at least twice: once in Fletch Lives, and again in an episode of The X-Files.
• Ever since his Star-Making Role as Gus Fring on Breaking Bad, pretty much all of Giancarlo Esposito's roles have been some form of stoic Diabolical Mastermind.
• Name a Dennis Farina role that wasn't a cop or a mobster. We're waiting. (Justified in that, as an 18-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department, Farina knows what he's doing in those roles.)
  • He played a soldier in Saving Private Ryan. Granted, it was a very brief role, and wasn't particularly different from his cop roles.
  • He played a stock trader in What Happens in Vegas. But he's still a hard-ass.
  • He played the hard-ass Cousin Avi (as well as unashamedly American) in Snatch.. Though, as Avi's business isn't completely legit, this arguably falls under his mobster roles.
• Chris Farley was known for playing clumsy fat guy roles.
  • His one-time partner in comedy David Spade is known for playing a Jerkass Deadpan Snarker.
• Joey Fatone of *NSYNC fame has played roles as boy band members such as Harvey Street Kids, Shorty McShorts' Shorts and a Progressive commercial focusing on a teen pop boy band called The Discountz.
• Tom Felton may get this way post-Harry Potter seeing as his character in Rise of the Planet of the Apes is Draco Malfoy without magic.
• Will Ferrell is becoming increasingly typecast as two different characters: The Idiotic Manchild and The Arrogant Buffoon.
  • Not if you count Stranger Than Fiction.
  • Kicking And Screaming also doesn't quite count. He was a meek but otherwise well-adjusted man with father issues. Of course, those father issues caused him to go both "Idiotic Manchild" and "Arrogant Buffoon" over the course of the movie, getting way too invested in peewee soccer for the sake of one-upping his old man.
  • And then there's The LEGO Movie, where he's an Archnemesis Dad and Control Freak. The Man Upstairs is a more subtle version.
• If your film needs a Jerkass villain, Ralph Fiennes is your man. He's either that or an introverted, brooding hero. Or an introverted, brooding villain, like he was in Red Dragon.
• Before his recent Oscar nominated roles Colin Firth every role the poor guy got since Pride and Prejudice has just been a role saying "hey look, this guy was Mr Darcy! Look at him be Mr. Darcy!" Bridget Jones turned this up to eleven, by actually basing his character on Mr. Darcy. In universe, Bridget Jones is a fan of Colin Firth and of his portrayal of Mr Darcy.
• Harrison Ford is the badass everyman. As he's gotten older, more and more Papa Wolf has slipped into his roles.
  • A cartoon titled "Rare Movies Festival" had on its programming for one of the days: "Harrison Ford movies where he doesn't run".
  • And if you're one of his co-stars, there's a good chance he's going to be angrily pointing at you.
• Morgan Freeman currently provides the image for the Typecasting index page. He's often (though not always) a wise old black man, usually some sort of authority figure; and he's famous for his smoothly deep voice, which is considered awesome enough that he's often played a narrator role (especially in documentaries). Though at least he's not known only for being Easy Reader.
• Dwight Frye, the man that played the first Igor-like character Fritz in Frankenstein (1931) was well as doing a very good Renfield in Dracula (1931) ended up hating the fact he always ended up playing as "...idiots, half-wits and lunatics on the talking screen!"
• Guillermo Francella always does comedies, and he's always either the goofy lovable horndog, the irresponsible parent who has a change of heart at the end of the movie, or both.
  • He has done a couple more serious roles lately (even losing his signature mustache), but even then his characters are always fans of Racing Club of Avellaneda, just like he is in real life.
• Dennis Franz is a cop who gets naked.
• Has Martin Freeman ever played a major role in which he isn't playing a slightly grumpy, plain, occasionally humorous everyman character? It's all he ever seems to be cast as.
  • In Wild Target he played a suave assassin with frighteningly white teeth. Bit of a break from tradition.
  • The Hobbit may or may not change this. The above character traits kind of fit Bilbo as well, though.
  • Between Arthur Dent, John Watson, and Bilbo Baggins, he's apparently cornered the market on quintessentially British everyman characters from books who serve as foil for more colorful, eccentric characters, ask questions so the audience has some idea what's going on, and didn't expect to get dragged into an adventure. So basically Arthur Dent is just a taller Bilbo, and John Watson is just a badass Arthur Dent, and you just didn't realize it until they were all Martin Freeman.
  • Subverted by his turn in Fargo; he plays an American doormatish everyman character who almost immediately becomes a wife-murdering scumbag.
• Stephen Fry is often described to have been typecast as Stephen Fry, the charmingly quintessential Englishman who is probably smarter than you but too polite to say so.
• French actor Jean Gabin was famous for playing all roles alike, be it as a policeman, gangster, scientist or anything else: the old-school, patronizing and somewhat short-tempered patriarch - to the point that his roles hardly needed to be given names, since people would refer to them as "Chief Gabin" or "Professor Gabin".
• Zach Galifianakis always tends to play the Psychopathic Manchild/creepy weirdo, more often or not with a large beard.
  • He somewhat breaks this type in his role as Ray on Bored to Death, as he often plays the snarky voice of reason to the bumbling main character. He does occasionally show poor judgement and a bit of emotional immaturity though, leaning back into his wheelhouse a little and handing off the Sanity Ball to Jonathan.
• German actor Otto Gebühr was pretty much a doppelganger of King of Prussia Frederick the Great. He ended up playing him sixteen times between 1921 and 1942, culminating with The Great King.
• Mel Gibson often stars as a badass hero in historical Period Piece movies; such as Braveheart, The Patriot (2000), We Were Soldiers, Pocahontas...
  • When the role is contemporary, he is bound to be off-kilter, such as the Cowboy Cops Max Rockatansky and Martin Riggs, a thief who's obsessed with getting his stolen $70000 back in Payback, the downright insane taxi driver in Conspiracy Theory, and a guy who only speaks through a puppet in The Beaver.
• Best known for playing James in Twilight, Cam Gigandet has also played villains in Never Back Down and The O.C..
• Walton Goggins usually plays scummy guys in Westerns, both original and modern, with the question being how villainous his character is.
• Jeff Goldblum has played a lot of twitchy geniuses and intellectuals in his career (particularly detectives, writers, and most famously people who work in the sciences), to the point that it surprises many that he made his film debut playing a rapist and has also played (among other things) a lawyer/gangster, a silent, dreamy "Tricycle Man", the owner of a disco, and a German nightclub entertainer/Holocaust survivor.
  • "Okay, Jeff Goldblum was pretty hot back in the day. Dude can't help it if he's always playing Woody Allen action hero."
• John Goodman is always the big manly bear with No Indoor Voice.
• Gilbert Gottfried generally was the loud, obnoxious guy who squints, complains and screams a lot. Then again, it was part of his act, and he initially squinted to cope with stage fright.
• Kelsey Grammer has played refined intellectual Frasier Crane, refined intellectual villain Sideshow Bob and refined intellectual hero Hank McCoy.
  Cracked: Grammer holds the distinction of being the only actor ever to win three Golden Globes for the same role. Sounds great, until you realize he has three statues at home reminding him every day that, as they lower him into the ground, there's a good chance the priest will accidentally refer to him as "the departed Dr. Crane."
• Hugh Grant is the dorky-yet-lovable Brit. As he's getting older, that role is often passed to Martin Freeman. Or Eddie Redmayne.
  • His p-p-p-p-persistent nervous s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-studder.
  • In more recent years he's broadened out from the dorky-yet-lovable thing and has been very successful as a handsome-but-sleazy Jerkass Brit, in Bridget Jones' Diary and About a Boy. In Cloud Atlas he's an Affably Evil slave-owning missionary with yellow teeth.
• Lorne Greene as a wise and understanding patriarchal figure whose family works with him under his command on a professional basis in Bonanza, Battlestar Galactica and Code Red.
• After his debut role as Hives in Animal Crackers (1930), Robert Grieg played the Loyal Butler in something like thirty films. He was also in Trouble in Paradise.
• Noel Gugliemi, you probably don't know who that is, but any movie that needs a stereotypical latino gangbanger he is sure to be cast and he'll always say something like "What you say, homes?"
• Jake Gyllenhaal usually plays socially awkward or mentally unstable characters (or sometimes, both), his roles in Donnie Darko, Zodiac (2007) and Nightcrawler are good examples.
• Sid Haig is a gore porn psychopath.
• Jerry Haleva is an extreme example. His every credited acting role has been as Saddam Hussein. Though anecdotes seem to suggest he could also have played Stalin.
• Jackie Earle Haley. As Cracked put it: "Johnny Depp nailed the A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) audition and went on to become an iconic movie actor, while his friend was doomed to roles as smelly hippies, smelly perverts and smelly psychopaths."
  • Then Haley nailed an Elm Street audition of his own years later... which resulted in him playing another (presumably) smelly psychopath.
  • With his recent Charlie Chaplin-esque turn in the film Louis, don't count Haley out just yet.
• Anthony Michael Hall often played geeks, losers, etc. He even turned down such roles in Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Pretty in Pink to try and avoid being typecast. He tried to play against type, some successful attempts (Edward Scissorhands) and some not so much (Johnny B. Goode).
• Mark Hamill may have had the image of Luke Skywalker dogging his live-action career, but he's typecast as a voice for cackling villains in animation, such as Fire Lord Ozai in Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Hobgoblin in Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and most famously The Joker in the DC Animated Universe and the video game Batman: Arkham Asylum. (Oh the irony: Tim Curry was originally pegged to voice the Joker.) There was even one he played in both live-action and animation, the Trickster. The Luke Skywalker image probably wasn't lessened by him effectively playing an older version of the character in Wing Commander III and IV, as Colonel Christopher Blair. Particularly not when you consider how to win WC3.
• Armie Hammer has portrayed at least three closeted queer characters in period pieces, with two of them based on real people: Clyde Tolson in J. Edgar, James Lord in Final Portrait, and Oliver in Call Me by Your Name.
• Tom Hanks doesn't always play a man who is personally decent and professionally reliable, but it's the way to bet. To the point that the reveal of him playing Mister Rogers in a Biopic was met with such an onslaught of "Of course he fucking is!" from the Internet that it turned into a mini-meme.
• Ever since Natural Born Killers, Woody Harrelson has been typecast as the paranoid, Conspiracy Theorist redneck nutjob or the equally paranoid and crazed military man.
• Kit Harington is almost always cast as either stoic badasses or kind pretty boys roles due to his admitedly pretty limited acting range.
• Ironically, before his most famous and memorable role as the very first incarnation of the universe's most famous Doctor, William Hartnell was constantly typecast as tough military types, usually a sergeant of some sort (such as the title role in Carry On, Sergeant and in The Mouse That Roared). It was supposedly him being tired of this kind of role that convinced him to take on the role that he would play until his health forced him to retire, which would ironically be his most iconic of all, completely overshadowing his entire typecast career.
• Jon Heder. Need the tall, gangly nerd who talk with a strange speech pattern to rival Shatner? Look no further. To the point that every role he's ever played is just Napoleon Dynamite to some degree.
• Outside of playing Loki, Tom Hiddleston is best known for playing Shakespearean characters or British military men.
• Freddie Highmore is always the good natured kid in fantasy film.
  • ... And now he's Norman Bates. Quite the play against type.
• Take the Italian duo of actors, better known with the Stage Names of Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, made famous by spaghetti-westerns and Bash Brothers movies. While the former has found some variation in his career, like playing a live-action Lucky Luke and, currently, a detective priest in a Italian TV Series, the latter was still anchored to the characters he did in his movies until just before his passing — see this commercial.
• James Hong, professional cranky old Asian guy. He's played the same role for over three decades, and it seems like he was never actually young.
• Clint Howard is (except on the roles brother Ron Howard gives to him) always a weirdo with a peculiar face, or as Adam Westing to his role in Apollo 13 (one of Ron's movies) a NASA Mission Control operative.
• John Hurt has played a wide range of characters and personalities over his long career, but in disproportionately many of his roles, he either dies in some gruesome way (probably most famously as the chestburster victim in Alien - later parodied in Spaceballs) or experiences some horrible torture (e.g. as Winston Smith in Room 101 in Nineteen Eighty-Four or as Max, a prisoner tormented by sadistic guards in Midnight Express).
• Michael Imperioli also came to fame playing gangsters, particularly Christopher Moltisanti. Which is funny, considering that most of his roles since have been police detectives.
• Jeremy Irons as a classy villain, a mentor, or, in a documentary, the Narrator.
• Michael Ironside as either a badass (who may or may not be an amputee and is increasingly likely to be an Old Master) or as a snarky Big Bad who either has superpowers or is trying to kill an orca. In recent movies (Terminator Salvation, X-Men: First Class), he's played non-action naval commanders.
• Samuel L. Jackson nearly always plays badass Scary Black Men who are contractually obliged to say "motherfucker". Given his record in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Mace Windu wouldn't be nearly as badass in the EU had Jackson not been playing him.
  • Incidentally, Samuel L. Jackson apparently had trouble not cursing for one movie that was trying to keep a PG-13 rating. They were talking about it in the extras on the DVD.
    • Far more than the swearing alone, Samuel L. Jackson has simply been typecast ever since Pulp Fiction as a badass Motherfucker. Before that movie, he played a variety of small roles. Variety as in actually varied.
  • Samuel L. Jackson is so considered a badass that when it came time to give the Ultimate Universe version of Nick Fury (the most badass secret agent this side of James Bond) a new look, he was made to look like... Samuel L. Jackson. Jackson agreed to let them use his likeness on condition of getting to play Fury in the movies.
• Clifton James was often cast as comedic and/or corrupt sheriffs and police officers, e.g. as Sheriff Pepper in two James Bond films (Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun), and similar roles in Bankshot, Silver Streak, Superman II, and many others. He also played the drunken, corpulent, and corrupt disgraced police chief Pat McGloin in the 1973 film version of Eugene O'Neill's Iceman Cometh.
• It seems as though Kevin James is turning to filling the "sweet natured, but slightly clumsy obese guy" void left by Chris Farley.
• Ken Jeong as the "obnoxious Asian dude who thinks he's a badass".
• Royce Johnson regularly gets cast as police officers, with Brett Mahoney in Daredevil (2015) being the most notable of them.
• Although he's played several other occupations (he mainly has a background in sketch comedy), Jay Johnston frequently gets cast as police officers, most notably as Officer Jay on The Sarah Silverman Program but also in a few episodes of Arrested Development, a Comedy Central special, a Mr. Show sketch, an episode of Community, in High School U.S.A. and one of his many characters in Moral Orel.
• Eldest Jonas Brother Kevin Jonas has been stuck in every major role the group has appeared in as the Cloud Cuckoo Lander.
• Doug Jones is usually cast as Man in a Really Good Monster Costume With All His Lines Dubbed Over.
  • Although when he reprised the role of Abe Sapien in Hellboy II: The Golden Army he got to perform the dialogue as well as wear the suit.
  • Paul Casey does this in Doctor Who and Torchwood. Jimmy Vee often takes on shorter roles in this case, such as the Moxx of Balhoon or Bannakaffalatta.
• Tommy Lee Jones is the grumpy, badass authority figure. See: The Fugitive, No Country for Old Men, Men in Black, U.S. Marshals, Captain America: The First Avenger.
• Looking for someone to play a Genius Bruiser (of any type)? Call Christian Kane.
• Boris Karloff almost exclusively played dark, ominous figures, albeit usually with a twinge of sympathy and a shade of dignity. His best-known role is actually a bit of an aversion.
• Peter Keleghan is the doofus on Canadian television. (The Red Green Show, Made in Canada, The Newsroom)
• Embraced by German-born actor Udo Kier, who often plays villains, vampires, or villainous vampires. He states that he loves playing such roles and keeps choosing them for that reason.
• Klaus Kinski was mostly cast for choleric and psychotic characters. Furthermore he was also showing similar traits in real life.
• Wayne Knight usually plays characters who are either cynical Fat Bastards or downright obnoxious buffoons.
• The Czech actor Miloš Kopecký was largely known for playing comedic villainous characters, usually elegant yet hammy in their mannerisms, such as in Lemonade Joe, Adele Hasn't Had Her Dinner Yet and a considerable number of others.
• Ashton Kutcher, barring The Guardian and The Butterfly Effect, has essentially been playing Michael Kelso for the last decade and a half.
• Shia LaBeouf is the young every-dude in sci-fi/action films produced by Steven Spielberg.
• Hugh Laurie used to usually be cast an Upper-Class Twit until House changed his image forever.
• Bert Lahr, who played The Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, later complained that he was typecast as a lion: "There just aren't all that many parts for lions."
• John Larroquette's most famous TV roles are the womanizing lawyer Dan Fielding in Night Court, the levelheaded lawyer Carl Sack in Boston Legal, the psychopathic lawyer Joey Heric in The Practice, and the hot-headed lawyer Lionel Tribbey in The West Wing. Noticing a pattern?
• Robert LaSardo. There's hardly any hit TV series that at some point didn't cast him as a Tattooed Crook and/or mobster. His impressive real life tattoos help a lot.
• Subverted by Heath Ledger. After 10 Things I Hate About You came out, Ledger dropped off the Hollywood radar for a year, because he didn't want to be cast as the highschool heartthrob for the rest of his career. Afterwards he appeared in The Patriot (2000), Monster's Ball, A Knight's Tale, and others before breaking out in Brokeback Mountain and finally as the Joker in The Dark Knight. His final role was Tony in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.
• Bruce Lee as the Asian version of John Wayne.
• Christopher Lee's sepulchral tones had made him a career out of playing villains, Gothic Horror or otherwise. Though to be fair, he's well-suited for it, with his razor-thin build, dark eyes, towering height, and powerful deep voice.
  • Somewhat going against type, he plays Death in the TV adaptation of the first two Discworld novels.
  • He also plays Ansem the Wise in Kingdom Hearts II, whose point on the villain / Antihero line is inversely proportional to where the Nobodies fall on said line for you.
• Jay Leno played thug type roles in sitcoms like Alice and Laverne & Shirley before becoming the host of The Tonight Show.
• Jared Leto, as the guy who gets the shit kicked out of him.
  • He's usually some variation of the Universe's resident Chew Toy, Woobie, or, more routinely, an example of Break the Cutie simply because his characters survive the amount of crap they're put through (most of the time...). Requiem for a Dream anyone? Oh wait, how about Lord of War?
    • The scene where Edward Norton beats him to within an inch of his life in Fight Club is called something like "Killing the Angel."
  • In recent years, Leto has apparently gotten a second typecasting: creepy, vaguely sexual villains, in films like Suicide Squad (2016) and Blade Runner 2049.
• Ray Liotta found himself seriously pigeonholed by Goodfellas. Even in sci-fi thrillers (No Escape), he's still playing an ex-con of some sort. Interestingly, he played a cop in Narc, and his performance was much-acclaimed.
• John Lithgow went through a period in the 1980s where he played a scientist in several movies. If it's 1985, and your movie needs a physicist who does not act like a Mad Scientist (with an exception), then John Lithgow is your man. He plays a computer scientist in 1983's Twilight Zone: The Movie, a University of Kansas science professor in 1983's The Day After, physicists in 1986's The Manhattan Project and 1984's The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, and an engineer who designs interplanetary spacecraft in 1984's 2010
• This trope was the bane of Bela Lugosi's life, poor guy. Most of his roles were somewhat Dracula-like villains, even when a film wasn't supernatural. This was so much the case that his few good guy roles seem to have been intended in part to surprise the viewers in movies such as The Black Cat (1934). His favorite role was in Ninotchka, where he finally had a romantic role.
• Peter Lorre, who after his Star-Making Role in M quickly became typecast as either creepy villains or varying shades of Woobie (see The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, etc.). Lorre tried hard to buck this, appearing in comedies (Arsenic and Old Lace), action films (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) and even occasional romantic roles (Three Strangers), but never shook off the bad guy image.

M-Z

• Tzi Ma as the father or father figure to Asian characters. His even lampshades this on his own social media by calling himself "Hollywood's go-to Asian dad." He's played these roles in Mulan (2020), Wu Assassins, The Farewell, Kung Fu (2021), A Shot Through The Wall, Star Wars Resistance, and American Dad!, among others.
• Michael Madsen (aka Mr. Blonde) as the ultimate gangster/psycho/both (well, except in Free Willy...). Or downplaying the first, a cop\tough guy. Interestingly this is used by filmmakers either to create a certain feeling (in Donnie Brasco, I'm not sure we'd be so reluctant to trust Sonny Black in the first half of the movie if he was played by someone else) or to confound our expectations (in Kill Bill, the assassin played by Michael Madsen actually turns out to be a repentant, down-and-out Punch-Clock Villain who gets Eviler Than Thoued by Elle Driver.
  • Actually used amusingly in the War of the Worlds parody bits of the Scary Movie franchise. When the guy offering the heroines shelter pulls down his hood and reveals his face, you know he's a nutcase before he's done anything because it's Michael Madsen.
  • In recent years, he's been playing American generals and agents in crappy Russian action movies. Why, would you ask?
• Joe Mantegna is very often cast as a mafioso, e.g. The Godfather Part III, Things Change, Thinner and many more. He also voiced gangster Fat Tony in regular guest appearances on The Simpsons. In a meta-example, in Bugsy, Mantegna played George Raft, a Hollywood actor known for playing gangsters.
• Jean Marais became a leading man in French swashbuckler films of The '50s and The '60s set between The Late Middle Ages and the pre-Revolution Cavalier Years, often as a man of honor who fights for justice and stops at nothing to protect his friends and loved ones, including La Tour, prends garde!, Le Bossu, Le Capitan, The Miracle of the Wolves, Le Capitaine Fracasse and The Iron Mask. The latter does stand out with his humorous, Large Ham and Old Soldier take on the character of D'Artagnan, who even spanks a noblewoman to punish her for lying to him.
• Miyavi's first blockbuster role as an actor was as the villain Mutshuhiro Watanabe (aka, "The Bird")—a cruel Soft-Spoken Sadist Sergeant of the Japanese Imperial Army that was in charge of the Omori POW camp in Tokyo during WWII—in Unbroken. His next role was as Gunpei Ikari in Kong: Skull Island...as a fighter pilot in the Japanese Imperial Army during WWII.
• John Malkovich, Gary Oldman and Christopher Walken are prone to being the inscrutable villain (sometimes Anti-Villain, but mostly not) and/or off-kilter insane. (exceptions: Malkovich: ...himself, Athos and that guy from Empire of the Sun; Oldman: Jim Gordon, Sirius Black and Beethoven; ...you got me now. Walken: Arguably The Deer Hunter)
  • ...Who are Deadpan Snarkers with a Creepy Monotone and weird Verbal Tics. Can anyone think of exceptions to that?
    • Exception for Christopher Walken: Tracey's dad in Hairspray. Ha! Yaoww... WoAAAoow!
    • Walken's gone on record of never turning down a role, mostly because he wants to try anything. While the roles offered tend to be a bit more odd, it did land him his revival from Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice".
  • Huge exception for Gary Oldman: the adorably clueless Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Considering the fact that both lead actors tend to be typecast as creepy villains, the following exchange from said movie becomes particularly awesome:
    Rosencrantz (Gary Oldman): I want to go home now.
    Guildenstern (Tim Roth): Don't let them confuse you...
    • Oldman also has a different category of Typecasting as a Reasonable Authority Figure. Aside from the already mentioned Commissioner Gordon, there is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, RoboCop (2014) and (extremism aside) Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. One of those, Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, gave him an Oscar.
• Rizwan Manji's filmography is primarily made up of playing doctors.
• James Marsden had the misfortune of being typecast as the Romantic Runner-Up, the Dogged Nice Guy, or a Romantic False Lead in most of his roles from the original X-Men Film Series trilogy onward (Superman Returns, Enchanted^note Though he did get a Pair the Spares there, The Notebook) until he did 27 Dresses, in which his character finally ended up with the female protagonist. And later, in Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), his character is married.
• James Marsters is almost always a Magnificent Bastard of a villain (even if Love Redeems him later on), probably because his incredibly high cheekbones scream "Did I happen to mention I'm the (sexy) villain?"
• James McAvoy is often cast as a Wide-Eyed Idealist or an intellectual (or both—Professor Charles Xavier is the prime example). He has also acknowledged that he is offered many period roles because of his skinny build.
  "It may sound strange, but I think it's because I'm pale and thin. [...] Me, I look like a malnourished urchin, and there aren't too many of us around. I'm healthy, but I've never been a big guy, which is unusual for a Scottish actor [...]. I'm just a little, skinny, weak guy, and always have been."
• Christopher McDonald playing a smarmy Jerkass character.
• Malcolm McDowell has been cast in roles that weren't a villainous or otherwise evil character, but most of them are overshadowed by his roles as a bad guy of some flavor (A Clockwork Orange, Blue Thunder, Star Trek: Generations and Fallout 3, among others).
  • When he's not outright evil, he still tends to be a Bunny-Ears Lawyer, with having a arrogant jerkass attitude being the Bunny Ears.
• Joseph Mawle has a thing for playing tragic characters who starts as humans only to be turned into tragic creatures by unusual means like Adam Hitchens from The Hallow, Benjen Stark in Game of Thrones , and Adar in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
• Ian McNeice always plays the Fat Bastard.
• Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn is best known for playing nasty authority figures with a mean disposition who are constantly displeased with their subordinates: a Corrupt Corporate Executive in The Dark Knight Rises, an Imperial officer charged with building the Death Star in Rogue One, the aloof King George VI in The Darkest Hour, and the Sheriff of Nottingham (nuff said) in Robin Hood (2018).
• Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen is very versatile but if he’s in an English speaking and/or franchise role, he’s usually playing a villain. Some examples: the titular character in Hannibal, Le Chiffre from Casino Royale (2006), Kaecilus from Doctor Strange (2016), and the recast Gellert Grindelwald in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore.
• Dylan Moran became famous for playing the misanthropic alcoholic Bernard Black in Black Books, and has been playing similar characters ever since.
• Rick Moranis has been known for being cast as hyperactive fast-talkers, Deadpan Snarker types, and dweeby guys. According to some sources, he got tired of being typecast as the last of these, which is why he's been on hiatus since 1997 (his primary reason was because he needed to raise his kids).
• Joel David Moore has been oddly pigeonholed as "That Weirdo Lab Assistant Guy;" he's been on Bones, Forever, and Avatar basically playing the same character.
• Jeffrey Dean Morgan always plays the dead guy.
• Look at Glenn Morshower's filmography. Almost all of his characters have a military rank.
• John Moschitta Jr, the world's fastest talker was always typecast as men who can talk very fast. Probably the reason we haven't seen him in anything lately.
• An in-universe example for Mr. Potato Head and Baloney in The Mr. Potato Head Show: PH is invariably The Hero and Baloney is invariably his Sidekick. The other characters aren't nearly as typecasted, however; Queenie and Johnny have played both villains and allies, for instance.
• Lucien Msamati seems to be becoming typecast as jealous, vengeful characters after playing Iago in Othello and Salieri in Amadeus. He also played con artist Toof in A Wolf In Snakeskin Shoes.
• Cillian Murphy, known for his unbelievably creepy performances in Batman Begins and Red Eye, has vowed never to play a villain again in order to avert becoming typecast (reprising his role in The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises doesn't count, as he was under contract). Meanwhile jury's still out on whether his character from TRON: Legacy will be a bad guy or not.
  • Meanwhile, in his Irish movies, he'll tend to be the everyman protagonist caught up in a situation he is reluctant to be in.
• Bill Murray plays mostly Deadpan Snarker roles. Ditto for Chevy Chase.
  • Mostly because that's how they are. Both are known for their huge amounts of Improv and most of their roles are just a long Throw It In!.
• Liam Neeson plays the aged badass with a haunted face and a certain chance of getting killed in his movies. If he doesn't die, he makes other people die in his place (The last bit can either be about Darkman or Batman Begins). You know how serious it is when "best movie where Liam Neeson kills everyone" isn't an Overly Narrow Superlative.
• Jack Nicholson usually plays quirky characters with a deep dark secret like in The Shining, and often he's the Large Ham. Except in some of his more sentimental roles.
• Leslie Nielsen is an interesting case in that his style never changed, but his image did a 180 degree turn: Pre-Airplane! he was the stern authority figure, but post-Airplane!: bumbling slapstick idiot. This because the latter always hinged on him delivering completely, outrageously absurd dialogue with a perfectly straight face. Subverted with Creepshow, where he just plays an evil bastard... although it is over the top.
• John Noble, professional awful father. When he's not outright Offing the Offspring, he's being emotionally abusive, or at best, emotionally distant.
• The last guy that tried to type cast Chuck Norris- oh, well, never mind.
  • Chuck Norris simply plays himself dialed down to eleven.
• Dean Norris has been typecast as a cop or soldier for most of his career, Hank Schrader in Breaking Bad being the most notable of these.
• Steven Ogg has been casted as a villain (or simply as a creepy man) since portraying Trevor Philips in Grand Theft Auto V.
• Al Pacino, much like Robert De Niro, is almost always either a mobster or a cop; to put a little spin on his typecast roles, Scent of a Woman had him play a blind retired war veteran.
• Joe Pantoliano is usually typecast as villains or moles for villains. These include such roles as Ralph Cifaretto on The Sopranos and Cypher in The Matrix. The only possible exception would be his time as US Marshal Samuel Gerard's second-in-command Cosmo Renfro in The Fugitive and U.S. Marshals.
• Broadway actor Patrick Page is known for playing a wide array of villain roles on the stage. His past roles include Iago in Othello, the Green Goblin in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, The Grinch in the musical adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, and Claude Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame musical.
• In Home (2015), Jim Parsons once again plays an obnoxious character who doesn't understand human behaviour and annoys everyone around him.
• Pedro Pascal has a tendency to play father figures with gray moral values. Prospect, the first movie to give him top billing on the poster, and The Mandalorian, the first TV show to give him top billing from the start, both consist of space westerns in which he takes life-risking, occasionally unscrupulous measures to protect an orphan. The Last of Us (2023) has him portray another such father on a post-Zombie Apocalypse Earth, with HBO airing episodes #7-9 during the same weeks as the Disney+ releases of The Mandalorian Chapters 17-19.
• Ever since Profit, Adrian Pasdar has frequently been cast as wealthy and powerful corporate or government authority figures.
• Dirch Passer ran into this trope hard. A Danish stage and screen actor renowned for his comedy performances, he became so associated with humor that audiences rejected his occasional stabs at dramatic roles. Late in his career, Passer took the lead in a stage drama and the audience started laughing during his first scene, unable to take him seriously. Passer was humiliated by the experience and never again tried to play a serious part.
• Michael Pate, a white Australian actor, had the odd distinction being typecast as Native Americans in Hollywood Westerns like Hondo, Major Dundee and McLintock!. His only Hollywood role as an Australian came in the John F. Kennedy biopic PT-109.
• Bill Paxton played a lot of overconfident, enthusiastic guys who get taken down a peg, sometimes fatally, sometimes not.
• When Josh Peck was still fat, he was known for playing the nerdy, socially akward goofball kid role.
• Ron Perlman is usually cast as Man in a Really Good Monster Costume With None of His Lines Dubbed Over.
  • Which is a damned shame as his role as Vincent demonstrated that he is more than capable of expressing subtle emotions and doesn't need to always be The Heavy.
  • Even as the Heavy, his performance as One showed subtle emotions with no monster costume and none of his lines dubbed over even though he doesn't speak French.
  • It wasn't until Hellboy that he was able to play a lead character in a major movie, usually he is a smaller character and under so much makeup you almost can't recognize him. He's one of those actors that everyone respects, at least those who have heard of him.
• Vincent Perez in 16th-17th-18th centuries period pieces. Usually as Mr. Fanservice, often as libertine casanova and as a Master Swordsman. Includes Cyrano de Bergerac, Captain Fracassa's Journey, La Reine Margot, On Guard, The Libertine, Fanfan la Tulipe and many more.
• Joe Pesci. Loud, angry, streetwise gangster-type from New York with a Hair-Trigger Temper who may or may not be an Ax-Crazy psychopath. He's currently retired from acting, perhaps to avoid doing such roles forever. Although he averted this in With Honors as the still crazy, but charismatic and educated bum Simon B. Wilder. His performance as Vinny in My Cousin Vinny where he was he wasn't crazy. Though he was still a snarky smart ass in both films. In one of his more recent movies, The Irishman, he's back to being a streetwise gangster, but for once, he's neither loud nor angry.
• Jeremy Piven is always the talkative jerk/drunk who spouts off asshole lines for no good reason.
• Jorge Porcel and Alberto Olmedo as the Argentinian Abbott and Costello.
• Favio Posca as "the family-friendly version of Fernando Peña."
• When Elvis Presley appeared in movies throughout the 50's and 60's most of them were as the happy-go-lucky guy in musical comedies such as Live A Little, Love A Little Kissin' Cousins and Stay Away Joe. Although he did play against type in a Clint Eastwood-style western called Charro!.
• Vincent Price, as 'the really creepy scary movie actor'.
• Jonathan Pryce is prone to playing authority figures. Among his most high-profile roles of this type are Juan Perón, Governor Swann, and ultimately the U.S. President. Before that, he was being pursued by authority figures...
• Need a Tall, Dark, and Handsome type who seems relatively harmless at first glance but hide dark personalities? Zachary Quinto's two most famous television roles on Heroes and American Horror Story: Asylum were twisted Serial Killers hiding under a harmless guise. His film roles since then have varied and even his role in The Slap was that of a Hot-Blooded Jerkass who slapped a child.
• Italian actor Giovanni Lombardo Radice was frequently cast in horror films, often as characters who suffered a gruesome demise.
• Jeremy Renner tends to play badass loose cannon types. See S.W.A.T. (2003) and The Hurt Locker for two prime examples.
• George Reeves, famous for his role of Superman in the 1950s live-action television show, couldn't get himself any serious work, despite many attempts to break that mold. His dead-end career has been one of many theories as to why he shot himself in the head.
  • According to rumor, he gained a role in the 1953 film From Here to Eternity but his part was cut back when audiences, associating him with Superman, chuckled whenever he appeared on-screen. However Fred Zinnemann, the director, insisted that this was not true.
• Keanu Reeves is the embodiment of spaced-out characters. See The Matrix, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, and A Scanner Darkly. There is some debate over how intentional this is.
  • It's a pity that so few people have seen the movies in which he plays The Heavy: in The Gift (2000), he plays a violent, wife-beating redneck, and in The Watcher, he plays a Serial Killer. As an Action Hero? Not so much.
• Alan Resnick often winds up playing weird, quirky, and artsy characters, such as the severely autistic Alantutorial, the Eccentric Artist Jack Mann, and the naïve and energetic Westley. Even when playing the violent and murderous Prince in The Call of Warr, he still retained the usual energy and quirkiness common to his characters.
• Ryan Reynolds as snarky self-deprecating Butt Monkeys. Or just as himself?
• To younger American audiences,it would probably be weird to see Alan Rickman as anything but the creepy bad guy with the sexy voice thanks to Die Hard, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Harry Potter (though he's just a red herring bad guy), even though his career has seen him in a very wide variety of roles. (Sense and Sensibility, Love Actually, Galaxy Quest, Dogma)
  • In his own words: "I don't play villains. I play very interesting people."
• Eric Roberts really lends himself well to playing Smug Snake villains (quite literally in Doctor Who). Nathan Rabin even said Roberts didn't help by being so good in Star 80 "it became hard to buy him as anything but the kind of violent lunatic who might torture and kill a woman."
  • His career started out promising enough, described by one magazine as having a profile so handsome "it could be struck on a Roman coin." But his serious roles went unregarded, so he willingly became typecast to keep working.
  "I’ll do anything as long as there’s one good thing about it. It can be a good co-star, a good director, a really great wardrobe. As long as it’s fun, I'll do it."
  • His sister's shadow still looms large (and his daughter is quickly catching up), but as a positive, he's proven an acquired taste among critics who grew up watching his schlock. Where once casting Eric Roberts was a sign of full-tilt laziness, the irony meter has gone full circle to where letting Roberts run wild will produce the best scenes in the film.
• Andrew Robinson made his film debut as the baby-faced serial killer Scorpio in Dirty Harry. He was so associated with the role that, despite winning an Emmy as the lead on Ryan's Hope, he was recast after 2 seasons because they didn't want someone noted for playing a serial killer as a sympathetic lead. He went on to play a whole string of psychotic killers in films like Hellraiser and Child's Play 3, until he finally got to play one of the good guys: former assassin and torturer Elim Garak in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The episode "Empok Nor" was one of his least-favourite of the series because it centered around a psychotropic drug temporarily reducing Garak to exactly the kind of one-dimensional psycho he'd been trying to get away from.
• Edward G. Robinson, before he was known as the vocal inspiration for The Simpsons character Chief Wiggum, was famous for playing gangster Rico in the unflinchingly violent Little Caesar (1931). In his private life, Robinson was an enthusiastic art collector who hated guns — in fact, when firing blanks on the movie set, he had to tape his eyes open to keep from blinking in horror.
• Julian Sands is...Julian Sands. No other way to put it, really. He was typecast as a good guy, before Warlock (1989), when he auditioned for the heroic Ferne. After that, it was all comic book villainy for JS.
  • He did play Superman's father, Jor-El, in the Smallville continuity. (You may have noticed Hollywood 'bad guys' tend to play Jor-El on television: Terrence Stamp, David Warner, Christoper Mcdonald.)
• Andy Serkis is the go to guy for Motion Capture performances. However this enables to play many different roles. Since playing Gollum in Lord of the Rings, he's played King Kong, Caesar in the Planet of the Apes reboot franchise, and Captain Haddock in Tintin The Secret Of The Unicorn. His role in The Force Awakens is also a motion capture performance. That said he does have roles outside Motion Capture such as Nikola Tesla's assistant in The Prestige, and Albert Einstein in Einstein and Eddington, but it's his motion capture roles that get the most attention. Like many a British actor he also plays villains like Rigaud in the BBC's 2008 adaption of Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit and was the voice of Screwtape in Focus on the Family's radio play of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters.
• Tim Roth usually plays thugs/murderers/convicts/all of the above at the same time. And he tends to die violent deaths.
  • He's playing a rare good guy (and television role) in Lie to Me.
• Mickey Rourke plays criminals. Thuggish criminals, insane criminals, diabolical criminal masterminds; In the twilight of his career, he's defied convention by appearing as...retired criminals. No wonder he briefly retired to take up boxing.
• Adam Sandler frequently plays the Jerk with a Heart of Gold, is Jewish, just like him. He rarely even changes his hair. He also likes to have weird vocal quirks and act like a social retard, yet somehow get the hot female lead.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger, in any action movie he stars in, plays unstoppable badasses. Once he is committed to a given task, nothing (including an invisible alien, shape-shifting robots or Satan) is going to sway him or stand in his way... no, actually, except for Sarah Connor and Batman. And if he is playing a father or is otherwise in charge of kids, do not mess with them if you value your life.
• Sadly, Jerry Seinfeld will never, ever, ever be able to act in any live-action role whatsoever. At least, not until he is past the age of 70. Fortunately, the fact that he is one of the greatest comedy icons of The '90s doesn't seem to have penetrated his mind, so for ten years he was happy just being a stand-up comedian, as he was before (and within) his prime-time reign.
• Tom Selleck has been typecast as cops or soldiers, particularly in Magnum, P.I. and Blue Bloods. Selleck himself, however, claims that his support for the NRA has hurt his career.
• Michael Shannon seems to always play robotic men who are one stubbed toe away from a psychotic break.
• J. K. Simmons has a tendency to play hardened killers and, in more recent years, blustery boss characters: J.J. Jameson in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man Trilogy, Cave "We're Done here" Johnson in Portal 2, and Chief Will Pope on The Closer. (Cave is arguably a blend of the two.) Then, of course, there was his Academy Award-winning role as Sadist Teacher Terence Fletcher in Whiplash.
• John Simm is the man to go to when you want angst. Up until his late thirties, practically all the roles he played were those of cocky, broody, bratty young men (The Lakes, Human Traffic, Cracker). When he isn't playing angsty Northeners (most notably in Life On Mars), he's playing angsty 17th century mercenaries (The Devil's Whore) or angsty 19th century Russian axe murderers (Crime and Punishment) or angsty Danish princes (Hamlet) or angsty reporters (State of Play, Sex Traffic). He only breaks out of the angst if he gets to play an over-the-top villain (Caligula, The Master). Fitting for a guy who's frighteningly convincing when he cries.
• Edward Van Sloan plays the same vaguely Germanic, gentlemanly, all-knowing doctor who is willing to take on the supernatural in Dracula (1931) (as Dr. Van Helsing), Frankenstein (1931, as Dr. Waldman), and The Mummy (1932, as Dr. Müller).
• Will Smith always plays the charming, witty leading man/action hero. More specifically, in his blockbuster action movies like Bad Boys (1995), Independence Day, and Suicide Squad (2016), Smith plays a wild card action hero as a foil to a by-the-books Straight Man partner.
  • Except in Hancock, in which he plays a drunk loser despite the superpowers he has.
  • Or The Pursuit of Happyness.
• James Spader's still playing a marble-mouthed sex freak, twenty years after sex, lies, and videotape.
  • Since Boston Legal wrapped up in 2008, he has diversified somewhat by continuing to play Alan Shore. (On The Office (US) and in David Mamet's Race.) He went further from the sex freak part on The Blacklist.
• You've got a fantasy or horror setting, and your Evil Overlord needs a comically incompetent but very loyal henchman? Timothy Spall is your man, as evidenced by Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (and subsequent Potter films), Enchanted, and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. He's recently tried to break out by playing the goddamn Winston Churchill in The King's Speech.
• Jason Statham, who is always a bald badass in action movies, often a tough guy with an English cockney accent. Except for a minor role in The Pink Panther remake… and Gnomeo & Juliet.
• Dan Stevens appears in a lot of British period drama films and TV shows. In America, he's frequently cast as the bad guy.
• Ray Stevenson seems to be starting to get stuck in a typecast as a hedonistic, laid-back, but still formidable warrior type; In Rome he was Titus Pullo, in Thor he portrayed Volstagg, and in The Three Musketeers, he's the type-codifying Porthos.
• Patrick Stewart, at least in movies and on TV, he seems to be typecast for the "good, wise non-action leader" role, especially "good king" - which makes it either very funny when he plays against type (see Jeffrey - snarky, somewhat Camp Gay interior designer and Pink Panther activist - and Conspiracy Theory - "evil, wise non-action leader") or rather unsettling (The Lion in Winter - still superficially the affable "good king", but the dialogue establishes really quickly that he's actually a selfish, scheming jerk who has taken someone raised almost as an adoptive daughter as his mistress).
• Fred Stoller as a drab and socially awkward loser.
• Mark Strong, as a bald villain with an English accent.
• Peter Stormare, professional sleazy, violent, Eastern European thug. Or a kooky, over-the-top, scenery-chewing character of pretty much any nationality.
• Pity the fool who messes with Mr. T.
• Terry-Thomas always played an upright Quintessential British Gentleman, although sometimes the "upright" only applied to his posture, and not his morals.
• Billy Bob Thornton was briefly typecast as Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonists after Bad Santa became a box office hit.
• Omar Sy often plays in An Immigrant's Tale. His background (born in France from Mauritanian and Senegalese immigrants) kind of helps.
• James Tolkan has often been cast as Da Chief, the Mean Boss, the Dean Bitterman and deranged criminals in The '80s and The '90s.
• One could summarize Danny Trejo's start in acting thusly: He was training another actor how to fight after having networked his way onto the film in prison, when someone says, "You look like an ex-con! Come over here and play and ex-con." And now, he gets a film showcasing his talents.
• It looks like Michael Trucco is being typecast as "the other side of the love triangle". He played that role to Starbuck and Apollo (sort of; their relationship is more complicated), to Leonard and Penny (contributing in their getting together), to Beckett and Castle, and, briefly to Barney and Robin.
• Chris Tucker as the effeminate comedy relief.
• Eric Vale lampshaded that he's often cast as a douchebag.
• Do you need a snarky, smug, British, bad guy who loves to get into his work? Then you want Mark Sheppard. Seriously, the entries in his resume where he isn't playing a villain are the ones who stand out. Most prominently known as Badger from Firefly, Crowley from Supernatural, Canton Everett Deleware from Doctor Who (one of his few non-villain roles), and Nate Ford's Evil Counterpart Jim Sterling in Leverage. He also was the antagonist for the first half of season five of 24, The Ring Director in Chuck, and the first Villain of the Week in White Collar he later returned in the show's fifth season as its main antagonist.
• If a movie script includes an Eastern European mobster, general, or scientist, chances are the character will be played by Rade Šerbedžija.
• Vince Vaughn as the awkward nice guy, whether he's the protagonist or the best friend of the protagonist. He also usually has a hot girlfriend.
  • The remake of Psycho is an exception.
    • Speaking of Psycho, the original Norman Bates - Anthony Perkins - faced typecasting twice. Prior to Psycho, Perkins seemed to be making a career playing the tall-and-gangly, boyishly charming male ingenue-like characters. After Psycho, he ended up playing creepy weirdos/psychopaths a majority of the time.
• Channing Tatum is a case of having been typecast twice. In most of his early roles he was cast as the Handsome Lunkhead. Then, after demonstrating He Really Can Act, he was once again typecast as the Handsome Lunkhead Who's Actually Smarter Than He Seems.
• It wasn't particularly imaginative making Reginald VelJohnson's character in Family Matters a policeman, considering he had already played a cop in Die Hard, Turner and Hooch, Ghostbusters (1984), the TV movie One of Her Own...
• After his Big Bad role in Nochnoi Dozor, Russian actor Viktor Verzhbitskiy has played one villain after another, including at least three evil oligarchs. Thanks to his larger-than-life acting style, he is often the only reason to watch those movies.
• Italian actor Paolo Villaggio had a huge success in his home country with the Fantozzi series of dark comedies, starring him as an incredibly unlucky, awkward, servile and frustrated office clerk. So much so that he later starred in a lot of movies where he was Fantozzi in all but name and tend to be confused with those other films by unattentive viewers. He played some dramatic parts, but the audience didn't care, so he continued to be typecast as bumbling, goofy schmucks.
• This was taken up to eleven for the Dutch actor Bram van der Vlugt, who went from performing Sinterklaas (the Dutch equivalent to Santa Claus) to being his official performer for TV events and films for 30+ years until he left the role in 2011 and handed it over to Stefan de Walle.
• Whenever Tom Waits appears in a movie, he's usually crazy and/or magical. The crazy magical hobo schtick is actually a large part of his musical persona too.
  • David Bowie is a similar case of musical and movie personas overlapping as he is usually cast in roles that take advantage of what the trailer for his movie The Hunger (in which he played a vampire) called his "cruel elegance"; whether his character is good or evil, he usually has a mysterious, cool aura. This has served him well in a colorful variety of roles over time. He also isn't afraid to play it for comedy or just play against type on occasion — in the Short Film Jazzin' for Blue Jean he gets to do both!
• The late, great Eli Wallach always played villains of some sort, from conflicted Bitchin Sheeps Clothing Guido to goofy, likable Anti-Villain Tuco. In fact, after Tuco, Wallach was typecast a couple of times as the schlubby, off-the-wall bandito. In his old age, however, he played more mellow and kind-hearted roles such as in The Holiday.
• Patrick Warburton is always cast as the big, dumb, lovable guy — Kronk, Puddy, The Tick, and so on.
  • Except in Hoodwinked!, where he somehow got to be the Intrepid Reporter, and the big dumb guy role went to Jim Belushi.
  • Warburton plays against type as the austere, intelligent writer Lemony Snicket in A Series of Unfortunate Events (2017).
• Ken Watanabe will appear in almost every American produced film that needs a “Japanese guy”.
• Denzel Washington as either a real life figure or a law enforcer.
• John Wayne is John Wayne, pilgrim.
  • The Duke himself put it best when he said, "I play John Wayne in every movie, regardless of the character."
• Robin Williams did voices. And funny stuff. Not so much later, but he continued to entertain and touch hearts. Even in death.
  • Roger Ebert said of Patch Adams, "This is a role Robin Williams was born to play. In fact he was born playing it."
  • He mixes in drama now and then, with Dead Poets Society or Good Will Hunting. Granted, the funny will still sneak in for a small moment, but it tends to be much, much more subdued and realistic.
    • Then there's Mrs. Doubtfire, which couldn't make up its mind.
  • Then there's One Hour Photo, which could. And then there's Insomnia.
• Bruce Willis tends to play soft-spoken tough guys - usually some sort of law enforcement, government agent, soldier or a hitman. This is due to the influence of Die Hard. Before that film, Willis was strictly a comedic actor. Apart from that he is always the badass everyman, and is known for being the king of the heroic comeback, getting beaten to shit by the bad guys and then coming back to win out. Unless we are talking about The Sixth Sense. or a rare villainous part. Or In Country (embittered Vietnam veteran), or Death Becomes Her (a nebbishy doctor), or Mortal Thoughts, or Unbreakable, or...
  • Sin City put on a small spin: he kills himself, despite winning in the end.
  • Considering the huge amount of movies that Willis has been in, playing the villain eventually stoped being a rare exception for him, with numerous examples such as: The Jackal, The Siege, Grindhouse, The Prince and many more. However, these are mostly (though not all) cases of Non-Action Big Bad roles with relatively little screentime that are nowhere near as memorable as his protagonist roles.
  • Unfortunately, due to his deteriorating health, Willis’s last roles mostly boiled down to Contractual Obligation Project Advertised Extra, which actually subverted any typecasting by having him just awkwardly shoehorned as any random minor character, oftentimes in nonsensical low-budget movies. Even in the rare cases when he was supposed to play a big role or the protagonist, the script had to be modified and his screentime had to be limited as much as possible because his failing health didn’t allow him to do any demanding scenes.
• Every role of Henry Winkler aka "Fonzie these days seems to be as an outrageously incompetent lawyer in various sitcoms and movies.
• All through The '80s, Michael Winslow tended to be The Guy Who Makes Noises. In fact, his entire career is built on being The Guy Who Makes Noises. He even admits this.
  • That's who he is in real life. Though he was a voice in Gremlins.
• Ray Winstone is invariably some kind of East End thug. Unless he's a boastful Anglo-Saxon thug.
• Elijah Wood is usually typecast as the wide-eyed innocent charming boy, ten years before playing Frodo from The Lord of the Rings. But since LOTR he's been desperately trying to avoid typecasting as, well, Frodo (wide-eyed innocent + Messianic Archetype). In fact, he was cast as a tough vandal in Green Street (also known as Hooligans) because he represented corrupted innocence.
  • He then completely reverses the ship by playing twisted serial killer Kevin in Sin City.
    • His last role before The Lord of the Rings was a hitman. A 17 year old hitman in a brilliant comedy. He was the best part of it.
• A truly bizarre spin on the trope: judging by his most high-profile roles, Sam Worthington has been typecast as... a Half-Human Hybrid (Terminator Salvation, Avatar, Clash of the Titans).
  • ... A Half-Human Hybrid created by the villains to join up with the heroes and bring them down from within, but eventually changes sides through The Power of Love and plays a pivotal role in defeating his creators.

Types of roles with multiple examples

• Nazis / World War II German soldiers form a whole category in itself. And not always "wacky".
  • German-born actor Hans Schumm was one of the early examples in Hollywood, running the gamut from simple soldier extra to despicable officers and spies in Warner Bros. films made during the war.
  • Otto Preminger preferred directing to acting, especially after going bald at an early age. He did appear in several productions, almost always in the role of a Nazi. It's ironic that this helped restart his career during World War II, given that he was an Austrian Jew.
  • Swiss character actor Billy Frick. Under a wig and with the right grooming, he bore a very uncanny resemblance to Adolf Hitler, and played him five times, including his most well known appearance in Is Paris Burning?.
  • Michael Sheard also played Hitler five times.
  • Günter Meisner played several officers (A Time to Love and a Time to Die, The Black Chapel, Counterfeit Traitor, Is Paris Burning?, The Bridge at Remagen etc), a Gestapo officer (Babette Goes to War) and Hitler a couple of times as well (Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Year, Ace of Aces, The Winds of War).
  • Anton Diffring's "Germanic"/"Aryan" physical type of blond hair, pale blue eyes and chiselled features saw him often cast as Nazis or German officers (Where Eagles Dare, Zeppelin, Operation Daybreak etc). Quite ironic considering he was Jewish (and gay).
  • Wolfgang Preiss bested even Diffring as a go-to Nazi. Name a World War II movie from the '60s and '70s and he's probably in it: The Longest Day, The Train, Is Paris Burning?, Von Ryan's Express, A Bridge Too Far, even The Boys from Brazil. Additionally, Preiss portrayed a staggering five German Field Marshals: Erwin Rommel, Albert Kesselring, Alfred Jodl, Gerd Von Rundstedt and Walter von Brauchtisch. When Preiss wasn't a Nazi, he was Dr. Mabuse. Ironically, Preiss made his breakthrough playing Claus Von Stauffenberg in the German film Der 20 Juli - a heroic variant on his later villainous typecasting.
  • Hans Christian Blech (a genuine veteran of the Eastern Front) was often cast as lower ranked, down-to-earth officers... on the Western Front, mostly.
  • Rudy Lenoir was French cinema's go-to World War II German officer, such as in The Longest Day, The Train, Is Paris Burning?, La Grande Vadrouille, Atlantic Wall and the 7th Company film series. He was from the Germanic region of Alsace, which was disputed several times between France and Germany, and most French people not from Alsace would easily mistake his Alsatian accent for a German one. And he was in some Nazisploitation works too...
  • Wolf Kahler, either as Wehrmacht soldiers/officers or SS officers in The Eagle Has Landed, Raiders of the Lost Ark, the TV sequels to The Dirty Dozen, The Winds of War/War and Remembrance, Band of Brothers, Cockneys vs. Zombies... It's something of a logical conclusion that he portrays an elder Shell-Shocked Veteran in The Great Escaper. Not to be outdone, he's also voiced WWII German officers and soldiers in video games such as IL-2 Sturmovik, the Company of Heroes series, RAID: World War II and Sniper Elite 5.
  • Ulrich Tukur, if you need honorable officers or officers with a conscience who do (or try to do) something against the Nazi regime. They usually end up paying it with their life. At least three officers he played chose to commit suicide instead of being executed — Kurt Gerstein in Amen (hangs himself), Henning von Tresckow in Operation Valkyrie (blows himself up with a grenade) and Erwin Rommel in Rommel (ingests a cyanide pill).
  • Richard Sammel has emerged as a modern Anton Diffring-like example (over 20 out of about a hundred in his filmography are such roles) with similar chiselled features, blond hair and pale eyes. He's acknowledged it but, in all fairness, he refuses tons of such scripts as well.
  • Thomas Kretschmann seems to be hopelessly typecast in such roles. He has played a German officer or soldier in over 10 works so far: The Pianist, Valkyrie, Downfall, Eichmann, the 1993 German film Stalingrad, U571, the Norwegian film Warrior's Heart, Head in the Clouds, In Enemy Hands, The Sinking of the Laconia, and the Russian 2013 film Stalingrad. He even played Joseph Goebbels in American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally. Oh, and, he's been cast as Baron Wolfgang von Strucker in Avengers: Age of Ultron. On the plus side, he usually plays sympathetic World War II German characters. This is further added by the fact that after being known for playing the role of Hermann Fegelein in Downfall, YouTube users would sometimes make references to his character ("FEGELEIN FEGELEIN FEGELEIN!!!") on almost every video that he appeared in.
  • Ulrich Matthes, usually as leading Nazi figures (Joseph Goebbels in Downfall and Hitler in Munich - The Edge of War for instance), though he's also played an imprisoned priest at the Dachau concentration camp in The Ninth Day and Ernst Jünger in Calm at Sea. Oh, and... he's dubbed Conspiracy's Reinhard Heydrich in German, while we're at it.
  • Joachim Fuchsberger played sympathetic soldiers in West German productions such as the 08/15 series or The Green Devils of Monte Cassino.
  • Götz Otto (Stamper in Tomorrow Never Dies) has played a good bunch of officers, be they SS or Wehrmacht. He had prominent leading roles in Downfall and Iron Sky, but also appears as a minor guard in Schindler's List. Of course, due to his height, he's easy to identify.
  • Sometimes, German-speaking actors who are looking for breakout roles in Hollywood want to specifically avoid such roles, which seems to be no easy task. Examples who have vocally opposed such typecasting include Jürgen Prochnow (who didn't want to play German officers again after Das Boot), Arnold Schwarzenegger (who refused every single World War II-themed script he was handed and instead worked his way up the ladder to become the quintessential Action Hero for The '80s and The '90s, even turning the perception of his accent around), Til Schweiger (who did end up playing one such role... as a rebellious and murderous German soldier who joins the Allies, he outright refuses for moral reasons otherwise) or Matthias Schweighöfer (who's blond and quite good looking but very much prefers comedies, he was very glad to do Army of the Dead and Army of Thieves with massive Netflix exposure after playing an infamous Gestapo figure in Resistance).
• Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal as an overweight, washed-up action heroes in direct-to-DVD movies since about the late 1990s.
  • Seagal always plays himself in every role. Always a ex-SEAL/military/CIA/cop agent who unreluctantly finds himself back on the job without. He is also without emotion, merciless and invincible.

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