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

These actors gave back-to-back performances that couldn't be more different.

By Jack Pooley /

What is the measure of a truly great actor? Not merely someone who makes you believe in the emotional truth of a single character, but can convincingly play a wide variety of disparate roles.

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It's always fun to see actors challenging themselves and playing against-type, and in the case of the following 10 performers, each played two staggeringly different roles in the very same year.

In the span of 12 months - and often much less than that - these actors went from playing a character more typically in their performative wheelhouse to taking a part that couldn't have been much more the other way.

And regardless of how each film turned out in the long run, each was nothing if not an impressive showcase of their ability to switch-foot from one acting mode to another, absolutely disappearing into each part in the process.

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...

10. Gary Oldman - Nobody's Baby & 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.

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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 Baby's 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 (Anthony Hopkins).

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 Oldman acting in very different gears - one inclined towards broad, larger-than-life comedy, the other towards human monstrosity.

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