8 More Actors Who Didn't Know They Were Being Weirdly Typecast

Really, really don't piss Ed Norton off.

ED NORTON HEADER
Paramount/Universal/Fox/New Line

There's obviously something to be said for establishing a brand. Tom Hanks is the world's favourite everyman. Johnny Depp is an idiosyncratic eccentric. Morgan Freeman plays wise men and God. Adam Sandler has made a career out of being that guy you call when you want to make an Adam Sandler movie. They're very much typecasting examples worn consciously on the actors' sleeves.

But what of the actors who seem to have unintentionally gotten typecast in rather more specific - and occasionally just plain weird - ways? After we established that Ryan Reynolds keeps getting cast in body swap movies and Brian Cox characters have created THREE amnesiac assassins, it seems there are even more actors who repeatedly get cast in similarly coincidental ways...

8. Christian Bale Has A Secret Mirror Identity

Christian Bale
Warner Bros/Lionsgate

Given how compelling Christian Bale is on screen, it's no surprise that film-makers would try to take advantage by having as much scope for him to perform in their movies as possible. That's why he tends to be given roles that either require larger-than-life caricatures or which demand several layers of performance.

Perhaps because he's so talented at slipping between characters, it seems he's carved himself a little niche of playing characters with a dark mirror identity. That happened first in American Psycho when his Patrick Bateman facade hid his murderous underbelly, which he followed in 2005 with his duel-roles of Bruce Wayne and Batman.

And the third example came with The Prestige, which took the double identity issue one step further with the twin deception. But in all three cases, the characters were defined by a deception, split between one publicly acceptable identity and one suppressed in disguise, living in the shadows. Clearly, he's got a knack for it.

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