10 Actors Who Made Comebacks In INSANE Movies

It's impossible to overstate the popularity of Jean-Claude Van Damme from the mid-1980s through to the mid-'90s. For an entire decade, he was one of the quintessential action stars alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Steven Seagal.

By the turn of the millennium, though, Van Damme's star power began to fade amid a slew of less-than-stellar action joints, much of which ultimately went direct-to-video.

But in 2008, he came back with a vengeance by doing the one thing just about nobody ever expected him to - give a genuine dramatic performance.

Van Damme starred in JCVD, a black comedy in which he plays a loosely fictionalised version of himself who gets caught up in the middle of a post office heist.

It's the sort of vanity-free performance few ever expected to see from Van Damme, who earned rave reviews for riffing so frankly on his own career, and for a climactic single-take monologue that's a genuinely brilliant feat of acting from the Muscles from Brussels.

Though JCVD didn't mark a turn towards dramatic fare for the actor, it did force everyone to consider him in a new light, and all the renewed talk about him led to prominent roles in The Expendables 2, the Kung Fu Panda series, and a few new Universal Soldier and Kickboxer movies a-piece.