10 Actors You Didn't Know Played The Same Character In Different Movies - Commenter Edition

Francis Ford Coppola's 1984 crime drama The Cotton Club focuses on the titular 1930s Harlem jazz club, and features a supporting appearance by Laurence Fishburne as gangster Bumpy Rhodes.

Rhode was actually based on the real-life Harlem drug trafficker Bumpy Johnson, and 13 years later, Fishburne would actually be cast in earnest as Johnson in the 1997 biopic Hoodlum.

This time Fishburne was straight-up playing Johnson without any innuendo - in a leading capacity, too - and despite the film's generally mixed reviews, he received warmly positive notices for his typically committed performance.

It isn't common for actors to play historical figures more than once in unrelated projects, especially when one of these performances is a fictionalised proxy while the other is part of a more traditional biopic.