15. Tom Hanks (Road To Perdition, 2002)
It’s easy to typecast Hanks as the modern-day Jimmy Stewart; in truth, he has varied that persona throughout his career, especially in emotionally draining career highlights like Saving Private Ryan and Cast Away. But prior to Sam Mendes’ handsomely mounted period crime movie, he’d never played someone on the wrong side of the law. In the movie Hanks plays gangster Sullivan whose career involves killing for a living, and who must struggle to find the essential humanity needed to bond with his young son. Although Sullivan ultimately is able to do the right thing (in-keeping with many of Hanks’ other roles), the tone of the character is far more melancholy and haunted than we’re used to seeing from this most popular of stars.
13. James Stewart (Vertigo, 1958)
There was always an underlying darkness and melancholy to the everymen that Jimmy Stewart played, most famously brought across in his suicidal yet compassionate businessman George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life. However, rarely were his characters as troubling or unsettling as in Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock’s kaleidoscopic masterpiece that takes the bold step of de-humanising this Hollywood legend. As Stewart’s character Scottie’s mind unravels, the boundary between reality and fantasy shifting as his great love seemingly comes back from the dead, the actor taps into a cold, chilling air of sexual paranoia and control that’s upsetting to watch precisely because of his pre-conceived, affable demeanour.
12. Christopher Walken (Catch Me If You Can, 2002)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq1oFOBut5o
Another acting legend famed for his array of demented weirdos, Walken once lamented that he all-too-rarely got cast as the father with a family and a dog. Props then to Steven Spielberg for casting Walken as a vulnerable, recognisable human being in his cracking 1960s-set crime caper, the actor largely leaving his oddball mannerisms at the door to portray the decent but unravelling father of Leonardo DiCaprio’s high-spirited confidence trickster. It’s a genuinely touching, heartfelt and quiet performance from Walken, its power heightened by its very normality, and proves that Spielberg deserves more credit for being able to elicit against-type roles from his stars.
10. Bruce Willis (Death Becomes Her, 1992)
Die Hard cemented Willis as one of our premier action stars but let’s not forget that at the time he was cast, he was best known for light comedy TV series Moonlighting. His return to comic material in Robert Zemeckis’ darkly humorous ageing satire Death Becomes Her is perhaps not quite as out-of-character as it seems, at least until one is exposed to the utter hilarity of his slapstick clowning, far broader and more unexpected than anything he’s done before or since. His brilliantly exaggerated horror at the physical transformations undertaken by co-stars Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn is truly rib-tickling and as far removed from his prototypical John McClane image as possible. See also: revisiting Death Becomes Her
8. Albert Brooks (Drive, 2011)
Best known for his array of nebbishy, neurotic types (Taxi Driver; Broadcast News; Finding Nemo et al), Brooks startled everybody with his altogether more brutal role in Nicolas Winding Refn’s chrome-plated classic. As violent criminal Bernie Rose the actor cuts a surprisingly intimidating presence, his stoic, brooding silences occasionally giving way to horrific acts of violence. As with so many performances on this list, it’s Brooks’ shrewd sense of understatement that really terrifies, and Refn too needs to be applauded for so savagely turning a popular comic actor’s persona on its head.
7. Sylvester Stallone (Cop Land, 1997)
It’s perhaps easy to underestimate Stallone’s dramatic chops; let’s not forget the first Rocky was based on his script and that his performance was a knockout too, far gutsier and grittier than anything in the sequels (entertaining though they are). It wasn’t until the mid-90s that Stallone properly stretched his acting range again beyond action fare as deaf small-town Sheriff Freddy Heflin in James Mangold’s thriller. In another actor’s hands, this could have descended into the worst kind of maudlin mugging; Stallone however beautifully underplays, sketching the character’s gentle, unyielding humanity in the face of a wealth of police corruption. It took until this year’s Creed for Stallone to tap into this wellspring again.
6. Jack Nicholson (About Schmidt, 2002)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfcjyXmSqOs
The eyebrow-raising Hollywood lothario has over the course of his extraordinary career presented us with more memorably eccentric characters than anybody, whether it’s the disaffected blue collar worker in Five Easy Pieces, the freedom-loving mental patient in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest or the purple-suited Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman. However in 2002, Nicholson finally acted his age and tore our hearts out with his role as the recently bereaved, deeply lonely Warren Schmidt, the sort of gut-wrenchingly emotional, subtly calibrated performance that it would once have been impossible to imagine Nicholson playing. If his final scene doesn’t make you weep, there’s something seriously wrong.
5. Robin Williams (Insomnia/One Hour Photo, 2002)
It’s unclear why some of our greatest comic actors make for some of our greatest big-screen psychos. Maybe it’s because humour and horror often exist on that razor’s edge of uneasiness, meaning the shift from one genre to another is perhaps a natural step. Either way the late, great Williams’ transition from rip-roaring comedy (and occasional drama) to spine-chilling psychosis yielded two of his greatest, most atypical performances, the comedian using every aspect of his famed physicality to terrify us whilst resisting any semblance of mugging or scenery-chewing. Of the two it’s possibly One Hour Photo in which he’s at his scariest: a consummate depiction of banal insanity lurking right on everybody’s doorstep.
4. Tony Curtis (The Boston Strangler, 1968)
Defying his cliched image as one of Hollywood’s most handsome matinee idols, Curtis here chilled the blood as real-life serial killer Albert DeSalvo in this disturbing, split-screen reconstruction of the latter’s crime spree and eventual capture. His handsome features subtly modulated to portray a downcast yet deeply disturbed individual, there’s no denying that Curtis worked overtime to get inside the criminal’s head, a far cry from the jubilant performance seen in Some Like It Hot just nine years earlier. The actor received a Golden Globe nomination but in truth the role’s power extends far beyond mere awards, showing how a star can turn their image inside out.
2. Henry Fonda (Once Upon A Time In The West, 1968)
Until the release of Sergio Leone’s sprawling, Ennio Morricone-scored Western opus, blue-eyed Henry Fonda was largely known for his portrayals of sturdy, dependable types. It was Leone’s desire to turn that very image on its head that resulted in one of the genre’s most iconic – and chilling – portrayals, Fonda’s alluring baby blues devoid of their former humanity as he brings to life cold-blooded killer Frank. It was a gamble that Fonda himself wasn’t sure would work; that Leone stuck to his guns and ultimately utilised his widescreen close-up compositions to grant Fonda a sense of implacable menace is one of the many reasons why the film remains a classic.
1. Ben Kingsley (Sexy Beast, 2001)
“Gal, we had a phone call just before we left the house… It was Don Logan.” Has any actor so thoroughly – and brilliantly – shattered their perceived iconography as Kingsley did in Jonathan Glazer’s terrific British crime movie? As the utterly feral, deeply terrifying, brutish gangster Don the Oscar-winning Brit thesp gleefully tramples all over his saintly Ghandi image to deliver one of of cinema’s all-time-greatest monsters, a consummate portrayal of a personality so rampagingly psychotic that the terror often spills over into black comedy. Kudos must also go to Ray Winstone, often typecast as a thug, for going in the opposite direction as likeable safecracker Gal, the man against whom Don is pitted in an age-old battle of wills. That both actors play so brilliantly against type is key to the film’s power.
