10 Actors Who Gave Two Wildly Different Performances In The Same Year

From famous cinematic chameleons who went wild even for their own beguiling standards

to relatively unadventurous A-listers who decided to surprise everyone totally out of nowhere

these 10 actors all ambitiously played completely opposed characters one after another

So I am Gareth here from WhatCulture.com and here are actors who gave two wildly

different performances in the same year. Gary Oldman, Nobody's Baby and Hannibal

Granted, Gary Oldman is well established as one of cinema's all-time great chameleons

an actor who's never turned down the chance to pull an about-turn and do something totally different

And while you could cherry-pick countless two-handers from Oldman's body of work that ran totally opposite

the most extreme example surely occurred in 2001. Oldman first appeared in the dramedy Nobody's Baby

playing crass, scarcely recognisable goofball criminal Buford Bill. Except Oldman's actually positively recognisable here compared to his performance in a movie that released barely two weeks after Nobody's Babies Sundance premiere, Hannibal

In Ridley Scott's sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, Oldman appears briefly as Mason Verger

a skin-crawlingly creepy child molester and the only surviving, albeit horribly disfigured, victim of Hannibal Lecter

Entombed within a ton of facial prosthetics, Oldman is damn near impossible to spot

All the more so given that he was even uncredited on Hannibal's original theatrical release

Beyond superficial aesthetics though, these films both see Ullman acting in very different gears

One inclined towards broad, larger than life comedy, the other towards human monstrosity

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Tom Cruise, Magnolia, and Eyes Wide Shut Though Tom Cruise enjoyed the mightiest box office success of his career with Top Gun Maverick

in purely artistic terms, there's no topping his absolutely spectacular 1999, where he worked with two legendary auteurs on two very different movies

nevertheless centered around similar themes. In the summer of that year, Cruise starred in Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut, where he played Dr. Bill Harford

a man rather ineffectually reckoning with the revelation that his wife considered cheating on

him a year prior. At the end of 1999, Cruise then appeared in Paul Thomas Anderson's sprawling

epic Magnolia, portraying motivational speaker and pickup artist Frank T.J. Mackey, for which

he received a Best Supporting Oscar nomination On the face of it Harford and Mackey are two very different sides of the same masculine coin One a sexually neutered man struggling to find agency the other a man who

professes to be the epitome of it. The only real commonality of the two performances is that in

both roles, Cruise plays characters who present themselves as superficially slick and suave from

the exterior, only to reveal something decidedly more fragile beneath the surface. Now I've got a

Quick question for you, what's your favourite Tom Cruise performance? One of these or something else

Let me know in the comments section down below, my friends. Jennifer Aniston, Rumour Has It and Derailed

Though Jennifer Aniston is unquestionably best known for her role as Rachel on Friends

and her movie career is largely defined by a glut of fizzy rom-coms

she's occasionally dipped her toe into more challenging and unexpected fare. Case in point, within six weeks of one another in 2005

Aniston starred in two films of wildly different tones, which in turn required her to give two markedly different performances

On one hand, there's Rob Reiner's ultra-typical rom-com Rumour Has It, which didn't really ask Aniston to do anything but play her regularly charming self

But on the other hand, Aniston played the female lead in crime thriller Derailed

Because the genre leap wasn't enough of a surprise for audiences, it also turned out there was far, far more to her character than initially suggested

Ultimately, it's clear that Aniston was cast in the derailed role precisely because of her good girl image

Having her star in two entirely antithetical movies barely a month apart

was basically a marketing masterstroke. Not that it helped, rumour has it, recoup its gargantuan $70 million budget mind

Sarah Michelle Gellar simply irresistible and cruel intentions. Sarah Michelle Gellar's characters in two movies released at the start of 1999

may look superficially similar. two beautiful well-dressed brunette women, but there's a whole world between them

First up, a week before Valentine's Day, the Buffy actress starred in the magical realist

rom-com Simply Irresistible. Geller played a young woman by the name of Amanda Shelton

who with the help of a magical crab, yep, you heard that right, is able to cook dishes which

bring out strong emotions in anyone who eats them, yep. Exactly a month later, however

Geller gave a far more memorable performance in an altogether more iconic movie

classic teen romantic drama Cruel Intentions. Here Gella played a far cry from the butter-wouldn't-melt Amanda

Catherine was a drug-taking, highly-sexed, conniving young woman, hell-bent on doing anything to get what she wanted

It was a performance quite unlike any Gella had given before, and as such proved rather eye-opening for those more familiar with her vampire-hunting heroics on Buffy

let alone anyone who paid a ticket to watch her frothy rom jaunt a month prior Daniel Day my beautiful laundrette and a room with a View Daniel Day is quite rightly canonised as one of our greatest actors

but back in 1985 audiences had no idea they were about to be introduced to a venerable master of

the form. Day-Lewis' big breakthrough came in November 1985, when he starred in the romantic

dramedy My Beautiful Laundrette, playing gay street punk Johnny Burfoot. The same day that

the film had its limited release in the US, a second movie starring Day-Lewis also hit screens

James Ivory's romantic drama A Room With a View. Here, Day-Lewis instead took the role of Cecil

Weiss, the unbearably snobby pretentious fiancée of the movie's main character, Lucy Honeychurch

Day-Lewis again received wide acclaim for his A Room With a View performance, with many critics noting how both distinct roles showcased his versatility as a performer

Most famously, Roger Ebert spoke of the duality in his review of My Beautiful Laundrette

saying, The character of Johnny may cause you to blink if you've just seen the wonderful A Room with a view

He is played by Daniel Day-Lewis, the same actor who, in Room, plays the heroine's affected fiancé, Cecil

Seeing these two performances side by side is an affirmation of the miracle of acting

That one man could play these two opposites is astonishing. High praise indeed

Shelley Duvall, Popeye and The Shining After being put through near literal hell on Stanley Kubrick's The Shining

it's little surprise that Shelley Duvall followed it up with something decidedly frothier

Robert Altman's infamous musical comedy Popeye. In The Shining, Duvall played Jack Torrance's long-suffering, evidently deeply traumatized wife, Wendy

a victim with a capital V, who nevertheless musters the wherewithal to extricate herself and her son Danny from Jack's psychopathic grasp

In Popeye, Duvall also played the central love interest and mother character

albeit in distinctly less combative terms, this time as the lover of Robin Williams' Popeye the

Sailor Man. While The Shining saw Kubrick allegedly bully Duvall to the point that she

had a legitimate psychotic break while shooting the movie, Duvall's work with Altman was decidedly

lighter. She didn't need to brandish a knife nor play perpetually terrified, but instead sang her

heart out and goofed around with one of cinema's all-time comedic greats, Jim Carrey, A Christmas

Carol and I Love You Philip Morris. Much like Gary Oldman, Jim Carey is a certified master of disguise

and clearly relishes any opportunity to surprise audiences with something totally unexpected

and that he certainly did in 2009, when he first appeared in the black comedy I Love You Philip

Morris and portrayed real-life gay con artist and prison escapee Stephen J. Russell. It was in of

itself quite unlike any role Carey had previously played a contrast which only proved more evident when at year end he starred in Robert Zemeckis A Christmas Carol Even accepting that there obviously a chasm of difference

between playing a gay conman and the grouchy Ebenezer Scrooge, not to ignore the various

ghosts of Christmas who Carey also portrays throughout Zemeckis' film, the assignments

were also totally different on a technical level. I Love You Philip Morris was a far more conventional

acting assignment for Carey in filmmaking terms, whereas A Christmas Carol saw Zemeckis once again

attempting to push the boundaries of CGI, with Carey delivering his entire performance through

cutting-edge motion capture tech. In 2004, the year before the Star Wars prequel trilogy was

due to release its climatic installment, Natalie Portman made a concerted attempt to prove to

Hollywood and audiences that she had true dramatic chops. Chops which weren't even remotely

appreciated on George Lucas' space opera Triptych. In the summer of 2004, Portman played the female

lead in Zach Braff's directorial debut, Garden State, with her deeply eccentric character, Sam

basically epitomizing what would in later years be termed the manic pixie dream girl

cute, quirky, and absolutely unlike any who actually exists in real life

At year's end, conversely, Portman appeared in Mike Nichols' drama Closer, playing a decidedly

more out-there and less bookish character, a former stripper by the name of Alice, and later

revealed to actually be named Jane. Spoiler, sorry. For Portman to go from playing a charming

girl-next-door type to a sexually confident, outgoing schemer was truly head-spinning to watch

with the latter proving persuasively eye-opening enough that Portman received a Best Supporting

Actress Oscar nomination for her transformative work, Bruce Willis, Die Hard 2, and Look Who's

Talking To. In 1990, Bruce Willis appeared in two movie sequels which were diametrically opposed in

basically every way that a movie can be. In the summer of that year, Willis reprised the role of

resourceful, wisecracking detective John McClane for action sequel Die Hard 2. At the end of 1990

he also returned to voice young Mikey in rom-com Look Who's Talking To. There are a few obvious

disparities between these two parts. One is a live-action role while the other was a voiceover

And most crucially, one sees Willis shooting terrorists in the head, and the other pits him as a baby coming to terms with the arrival of a baby sister

It's a fitting dichotomy of projects given that Die Hard initially represented a major career overhaul for Willis

breaking away from his noted comedy roles and establishing himself as a convincing everyman action hero

By starring in sequels to both a testosterone-fueled action flick and a cute family comedy in the very same year

Willis proved he could have it all. reflected by both movies proving successful at the box office

Bruce is the man, baby