1. Nicolas Cage in Adaptation (2002)
And, of course, the best of all one-actor-two-character performances goes handily in the pocket of one Nicolas Cage for his portrayal of Charlie and Donald Kaufman in the absolutely wonderful film Adaptation. Cage has made some incredible flops in his time--most notably, just about everything in the past 10 years--but this is a film for the ages. The story is as complex and convoluted as screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's psyche surely is. The movie is about Charlie Kaufman, a man who has been given the task of adapting Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief for the big screen. He can't do it. He can't find a way in. His brother Donald shows up in a hurricane of arrogance and frenetic energy, disrupting the neurotic Charlie and stifling his creative flow even more than it already has been. The brothers fight (in a manner familiar to fans of Sam Shepard's excellent stage play True West) and Donald eventually takes over the writing. The movie about the movie becomes a new movie and all manner of meta-fictional layers get overlapped, transposed, and mish-mashed together in a brilliant collage about movie-making, brotherhood, compromise, and the chaos of the artistic process. Oh, yeah, and Chris Cooper and Meryl Streep co-star. Brilliant? YES. What do you think? Do you have favorite one-actor-two-character flicks that we missed here? Let us know below!