10 Actors Who Played The Same Character In Completely Different Movies
2. Michael Keaton - Ray Nicolette
The Character: Ray Nicolette
The Movies: Jackie Brown and Out of Sight
Ray Nicolette first showed up in Quentin Tarantino’s uber-cool adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s book Rum Punch as an FTA agent using the eponymous Jackie Brown in a sting to catch Samuel L. Jackson’s gun runner Ordell Robbie.
Just six months after the release of Jackie Brown, Ray Nicolette – clad in his familiar leather jacket and sunglasses on a string and chomping on his trademark chewing gum – popped up again in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, another adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel, this time promoted to an FBI agent who is the married boyfriend of star Jennifer Lopez’s character Karen Sisco.
As the two movies were so close together in production, it made sense that Michael Keaton should reprise his role as Agent Nicolette. In fact, before casting Keaton in the role again Soderbergh checked out his first performance as Nicolette when Jackie Brown was in the editing stages and was so taken that hiring a different actor seemed stupid.
As Jackie Brown had gone into production first, its distributors Miramax owned the rights to the character but thanks to Tarantino’s insistence Out of Sight’s distributors Universal didn’t have to pay a penny to use Ray Nicolette again.