Typecasting is a professional hazard for even the most successful actors. Once a movie star is associated with a particular character or franchise, it can be hard to move on. Consider Robert Downey Jr, one of the greatest actors of his generation – but someone who can’t seem to move past Marvel. Or Seth Rogen, who, at 43, is destined to see out his days portraying stoner man-babies (fair enough, he does seem to enjoy the gig).
But some A-listers have done precisely that – ripping up the script and rebooting their career from the ground up. Here are 13 stars who have embarked on stark reinventions – and thrived.
Robert Pattinson
Nobody found the Twilight saga more ridiculous than the actor who became famous playing moody vampire heartthrob Edward Cullen. As soon as the series was wrapped, Pattinson put daylight between himself and teen fame by working with edgy auteurs such as David Cronenberg (Cosmopolis) and the Safdies (Good Time). So profound was his reinvention that when he returned to blockbuster cinema in Matt Reeves’s noir-ish The Batman in 2022, the vibe was of an indie actor dipping a toe in the mainstream rather than of a teen star seeking out the bright lights once more.
Emma Stone
Early roles in Easy A and Superbad established Stone as a likeable comedic actor. But she moved away from the predictable realm of teen dramedy by working with ambitious and often experimental directors. They included Damien Chazelle in the admittedly hugely annoying musical La La Land (for which she won the first of her two Oscars), Yorgos Lanthimos in surreal period drama The Favourite, and Alejandro González Iñárritu in the bizarre Birdman. However, a third chapter awaited: Emma Stone’s Really Weird Years.
First, she starred opposite cringe-comedian Nathan Fielder in unhinged drama The Curse. She then reunited with Lanthimos – and won her second Oscar – for unhinged steampunk morality fable, Poor Things. She’s gone from wonderful to weird – and never looked happier. That continues with her latest project, Eddington – a stark Covid social comedy by indie horror darling Ari Aster – and Lanthimos’s Bugonia in October, in which she plays a CEO kidnapped by conspiracy theorists convinced she is an alien.
Matthew McConaughey
McConaughey’s break was playing a small-town loser with a big streak of optimism – “just keep living!” – in Richard Linklater’s 1993 coming-of-age indie hit Dazed and Confused. But he had soon graduated to disposable rom coms – a chapter of his career that reached its nadir in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, a ludicrous “remake” of A Christmas Carol.
Knowing he was in a rut, he told his agent to reject all romcom offers. So began the McConnaissance, as he shed weight and won an Oscar by playing a man with HIV in Dallas Buyers Club. He also portrayed the universe’s best dad in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and radiated blinding levels of torture and vulnerability in Lovecraftian pulp caper, True Detective.
Will Smith
In the late 90s, Big Willie was the good-time rapper who doubled as a chirpy matinee idol in Bad Boys and Independence Day (having broken through on sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air). He then took a risk by leveraging his mega-watt charisma into a stunning turn as Mohammad Ali in Michael Mann’s dreamlike 2001 biopic Ali and received his first Oscar nomination.
He dipped in and out of movie stardom in the intervening years – but cemented his Serious Actor reinvention two decades on from Ali with 2021 sport drama King Richard – playing the driven and perhaps obsessed father of tennis’ Williams sisters. He was awarded the Best Actor Oscar, but his big pivot ground to a halt when he assaulted Chris Rock at the awards. This immediately overshadowed his accomplishment and has sparked a whole new mid-life-crisis style rapper reinvention that we’d rather forget.
Hugh Grant
Suave, dimpled, always with great floppy hair, Hugh Grant was a gift from the rom-com gods when he broke through in Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill. But rather than stay in his lane, he subverted his heartthrob persona, initially by portraying an (admittedly charming) cad opposite Renée Zellweger in Bridget Jones’ Diary. He showed even greater range in 2012’s science fiction curio Cloud Atlas, playing a variety of characters, including an unpleasant 1930s millionaire, a corrupt nuclear power plant executive, and a murderous gangster.
But it is only in recent years that Grant has truly transitioned to the dark side. He was the loathsome luvvy in Paddington 2 in 2017, then, on TV, he was a corrupt politician in the A Very English Scandal (2018) and a murderous surgeon in The Undoing (2020). His role as the religiously-obsessed villain in Heretic (2024) has been his darkest yet, and he’s actually said that playing “the rogue” is far closer to his actual personality – a shocker for the fans, I’m sure…
Brie Larson
Early parts in quirky sitcoms such as United States of Tara (where she played the daughter of Toni Collette’s character) and the movie Train Wreck (as Amy Schumer’s sister) set Larson on a predictable path to romcom sidekick purgatory. She was a talented comedic actor – one day, she might even have a sitcom of her own. Yet she pivoted into a radically different direction by playing an abducted mother in the horrific 2015 art-house flick Room – for which she won an Oscar – and then going full superhero in Captain Marvel in 2019.
Alas, a sizable minority of knuckle-dragging comic book fans refused to accept a feminist caped crusader and her second Captain Marvel outing, The Marvels (2023), flopped. Undeterred, she has continued to thrive – and without a romcom in sight – winning raves with her West End debut in revenge tragedy Elektra earlier this year.
Adam Sandler
Sandler was the clown prince of 90s goofball comedies such as Happy Gilmore and The Waterboy. But this prankster was revealed to have hidden depths when Paul Thomas Anderson cast him opposite Emily Watson and Philip Seymour Hoffman in his surreal 2002 comedy Punch-Drunk Love. Sandler, playing a cripplingly shy bathroom supply business owner, was a revelation, as he deconstructed his man-child persona to reveal the insecurities beneath.
He would dive further off the deep end with Spanglish (2004), as one half of a wealthy couple who invite their Mexican nanny and her son to move in with them. He has meanwhile kept a foot firmly in broad comedy, churning out breezy chuckle-fests for Netflix as part of a $275 million deal.
But it’s his serious roles that epitomise him as an actor and which feel like his true calling. He held his own against heavyweights Dustin Hoffman and Ben Stiller in Noah Baumbach’s family drama The Meyerowitz Stories in 2017, and radiated unease as a gambling addict in the Safdie Brothers’ Uncut Gems in 2019 – for which he was unfairly denied an Oscar nomination.
Jim Carrey
Carrey achieved fame as a cartoon character in human form in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and The Mask, then ruled the 90s as a rubber-featured comedian with a thousand quirky voices. But as with many comedians, his smile did not always reach his eyes – and he showed a darker side in reality-television-gone-wrong classic The Truman Show and then, opposite Kate Winslet, in Charlie Kaufman’s heartbreaking memory-wipe melodrama, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
But much like his comedy, sometimes he went too far as a straight actor – playing real-life eccentric comic Andy Kaufman in 1999’s Man on the Moon, he was accused of taking method acting to an extreme. His co-star, Paul Giamatti, recalled it as: “One of the weirdest experiences I’ve had making a movie… Jim was wacky.”
Bryan Cranston
Nobody did “goofy dad” better than Cranston across the seven seasons of Malcolm in the Middle, from 2000 to 2006. Hilariously offbeat and always up against it, Cranston made for a brilliantly cringeworthy everyman father.
But an earlier 1998 cameo in the conspiracy theory thriller The X-Files, playing a villain, had shown there was more to him than sitcom mugging, and a young X-Files writer named Vince Gilligan was one of the few to recognise this funnyman had a dark side.
Cranston was the only name on Gilligan’s list when he launched his own show, about a down-on-his-luck teacher who becomes a remorseless meth dealer. He tapped on Cranston’s door, and the one who knocks – aka Breaking Bad’s Walter White – was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world in 2008.
Daniel Craig
James Bond set Craig up for life as an A-lister. For 15 years from 2006, he played the world’s favourite spy, but he had no intention of seeing out his days looking dashing in a tuxedo and has cheerily subverted his 007 image with a string of outside-the-box parts – as a quirky redneck in Steven Soderbergh’s heist caper Lucky Logan in 2017, and a fictionalised version of gay author William S Burroughs in Queer in 2024.
He also demonstrated a hitherto unhinted flair for comedy as good old boy detective Benoit Blanc in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out franchise (which began in 2019 and welcomes a third instalment this December). From licence to kill to permission to tickle our ribs, his reinvention was complete.
Dev Patel
Patel shone as dorky Anwar in 2007 teen drama Skins, and as an awkward call-centre worker in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire in 2008 – but, at best, it seemed that this nerdy screen presence would have a future as a quirky character actor confined largely to indie films. He had bigger dreams, however, and turned his career on its head by embracing strange and challenging roles.
They included an adopted man looking for his lost sibling and parents in India in 2017 family drama Lion, and a mournful Arthurian warrior in 2021’s The Green Knight. He used those parts as a step up to shine as a charming lead in Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield in 2020, and had the courage to bulk up and play an action hero in the India set, John Wick-style thriller Monkey Man in 2024 (which he also directed).
Woody Harrelson
Eighties television is littered with cautionary tales of small-screen actors who thought they could crack Hollywood. As charmingly dim bartender Woody Boyd in Cheers, the odds seemed against Harrelson succeeding where more celebrated actors – including his co-star Shelley Long – have failed.
His way of moving on from Cheers was to opt for weird, often disturbing parts. He was chillingly sociopathic in Oliver Stone’s 1994 brutal road movie, Natural Born Killers. Paradoxically, the actor who escaped TV reserved one of his greatest performances for HBO’s True Detective in 2014, where he simmered opposite peak “McConnaissance” McConaughey as a womanising cop. He later went out on a limb playing a flawed police chief in 2018’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
Daniel Radcliffe
Radcliffe is the boy who had the courage and imagination to outgrow child stardom. Harry Potter had made him fabulously rich before he was old enough to drive. Yet rather than rest on his Hogwarts laurels, he has pushed himself again and again. He bared more than his soul in the nude horse play Equus (in 2007, four years before the final Potter film), was surprisingly spooky in The Woman in Black, his first film post the franchise, in 2012.
He then summoned Daniel Day-Lewis levels of intensity as a flatulent corpse in Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Swiss Army Man in 2016. But his freaky role period peaked playing the lead in 2022’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story in which he captured the eccentric charms of the eponymous comedy singer.
Through it all, he has maintained a healthy scepticism about stardom. His true superpower may be that, after all he’s gone through, he’s just a nice, normal bloke.
