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

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.

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.