Times where somebody shares a disguised anecdote about themselves in Live-Action Films.
- In Antonia's Line, the narrator of the story is revealed at the end to be Antonia's great-granddaughter Sarah.
- Parodied in Bridesmaids, where Megan tells an "inspirational" anecdote that is so transparently about herself that the little girl in the story is also named Megan. Annie even keeps trying to interrupt so they can skip to the obvious ending.
- Subverted in Caddyshack, with Ty Webb (Chevy Chase) telling the story about the guy "night putting" with the dean's daughter.Ty: You know who that guy was, Danny?
Danny: You?
Ty: Ha ha... No, that guy was Mitch Comstein, my roommate. He was a good guy. - Villain example in Cinderella (2015): Lady Tremaine tells Ella the story about a young girl who married for love, and was happy, until her husband died. Out of concern for her daughters’ wellbeing, the girl, now a grown woman, decided to marry again to provide them with financial support. But then that husband died, too. Her last attempt was to get her daughters to marry the prince of their kingdom, but the prince was instead wooed by a simple servant girl "and I lived unhappily ever after".
- When Daavar recruits Vijay in Deewaar, Vijay starts talking about one time Daavar got his shoes shined before revealing that he was the shoeshine boy.
- Early on in Le Destin Fabuleux de Désirée Clary, at a dinner party at Joseph and Julie's house, Bernadotte tells Julie an anecdote about a sergeant who came to her father's house with a housing billet and was shown the door and asks her if she would recognise that sergeant; of course, it was him.
- After the brutal final confrontation in The Devil's Backbone, the narrator turns out to be the ghost of doctor Casares, who now haunts the orphanage with Santi.
- Edward Scissorhands starts with a grandmother telling her granddaughter a bedtime story, about a man with scissors for hands who made it snow for a girl he loved. It is revealed in the end that the grandmother is actually Kim, the girl who Edward loved and who loved him."Sometimes...you can still see me dancing in it."
- Eyes of Laura Mars: Neville launches into the Red Herring's supposed tragic backstory, describing how his prostitute mother used to leave him alone in the same diaper for days while she was working, and how his probable father came home one night and slashed his mother's throat in front of him. Laura realizes he's talking about himself when he accidentally lapses into the first person.
- The Four Musketeers (1974). Athos, when he tells d'Artagnan the story of the Comte de la Fere. d'Artagnan figures out that Athos was the Comte, and near the end of the film Athos admits it.
- In Heroes Wanted, Santi recounts a story about a police officer accidentally shooting a boy held hostage, implying that his aversion to shooting is because he was that officer. Instead, he was that boy, and the officer was his father. He joined the police to prove he could be better than his father.
- Lycan: Isabella tells the others a story of a girl who went camping with her parents, then woke up to find them both horribly murdered, eviscerated by someone or something. The only part that was ever fictional is the girl's later suicide of course. However, in the end Isabella does kill herself stopping her evil adopted mother so even this part comes true.
- In Mackintosh and T.J., Mackintosh tells T.J. about a boy about T.J.'s age who started work as a chicken wrangler and eventually worked his way up to straw boss. T.J. asks, "That chicken wrangler. Did he grow up to be a man called Mackintosh, by any chance?" Mackintosh confirms that he did.
- The end of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior reveals that the Narrator All Along is none other than the Feral Kid.
- At the end of Maleficent, the narrator is revealed to be an elderly Aurora.
- In Matilda, the Reasonable Authority Figure Miss Honey describes how the Big Bad Miss Trunchbull was once her wicked step-aunt, without mentioning herself or Trunchbull by name. During the story, Child Prodigy Matilda immediately recognises Trunchbull as the mean aunt but only afterward realises that Miss Honey is the little girl. Interestingly, the original reveal in the novel was Trunchbull being the aunt, rather than Miss Honey being "the little girl". This was undoubtedly changed for the screen because it was easier to hide "the little girl's" identity than to keep the audience from recognizing Trunchbull in the flashbacks.
- Medicine Man has a rather nightmarish version and subversion of the trope. Dr. Campbell tells Dr. Crane why he doesn't want to tell anyone about the cancer cure he thinks he has discovered while living among the natives of South America — because another doctor, he explains contemptuously, had discovered a painkiller in similar circumstances, which resulted in another tribe being wiped out by swine flu when the drug company came down to mass-produce it. Later on it's revealed that Campbell himself was that doctor, and he keeps a journal filled with pictures he drew of every single person in the tribe he destroyed. Subverted a bit in that it seems almost a Freudian slip when he reveals this to Crane; it's not clear whether he actually wanted her to know.
- Near the end of On Chesil Beach, the timeline has jumped to 1975. Edward is telling a story to his friends about a couple who got married, but things didn't work out for them in bed on their wedding night. The woman told the man she still loved him and proposed a marriage where the man would be free to have sex with other women, but the man was too angry to understand, and they broke off their relationship. Though Edward does not say he is the man in this story, his partner Molly deduces it's him.
- In One Crazy Summer after Ack-Ack is kicked out of his dad's house, Egg starts telling him a story about "a little fat kid that nobody loved" that becomes more and more specifically about Egg as it goes along. Eventually Ack-Ack stops him and asks "Were you the little fat boy?" Egg replies no, but he used to beat that kid up.
- In One Missed Call: Final, Emiri’s boyfriend Jin-wo explains to her that at the Sign Language Summit where they had first met, he learned of the death call and how it worked from a deaf violinist whose girlfriend was killed by it. The violinist knew that he could’ve saved her by taking the call and dying in her place, but he didn’t, and forever regretted it, to the point of purposefully punishing himself until he went deaf. Then near the end of the movie, Jin-wo tells Emiri that knowing her made him stronger, and that he won’t regret it again. It’s this that makes her put two-and-two together to realize that the deaf violinist was him. And that he wasn’t going to make the same mistake again as he swipes Emiri’s phone (which had the death call forwarded to her during the climax), and takes the call in her place.
- Played with disturbingly in Psychopathia Sexualis. A woman tells some girls a very morbid story of how a mute girl found her voice (via screaming) whilst being raped and then killed her rapists who she and her father had put on a shadow-puppet show for. The girls listening seem very disturbed and the woman narrating it seems sad and nostalgic. In the end she offers a disconcertingly weak "It's only a story" to the girls.
- In Snowpiercer, Curtis tells the story of the chaotic early days of the tail section, when people starved and turned to cannibalism. He goes some way into detailing his own part ("I know that babies taste best") but shifts into third person when relating how things turned around. After a man kills a mother to get to her baby, an old man steps up to offer his arm to be eaten instead, spurring others to make the same sacrifice. Gilliam, Curtis' mentor, was the old man; Edgar, Curtis' protege, was the baby.I was the man with the knife.
- In the opening of the first Spy Kids film, Ingrid (the mother) tells Carmen and Juni a bedtime story about two enemy spies who were assigned to kill each other and fell in love instead. It is Ingrid and Gregorio's actual Back Story.
- Star Wars: In Revenge of the Sith, Palpatine tells Anakin about the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise, a "Sith legend" about the titular Sith lord who was killed by his apprentice in his sleep. Although the movie does not expand on this, supplementary materials reveal that the tale was hardly as ancient as the words "Sith legend" implied—Palpatine himself was that very apprentice. Furthermore, it is implied that Darth Plagueis's ability to manipulate midi-chlorians resulted in Anakin's birth.
- The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep: The main plot is a story that an old Scotsman tells to a couple of American tourists — at the end, the storyteller is revealed to be the story's protagonist, Angus MacMorrow.
- In Where the Truth Lies, Karen tells the story of a little girl with polio who was able to get treatment thanks to money raised during a telethon in the 1950s. It turns out it's her.
- In the 2010 South African film White Lion, we meet an old man telling the story of Letsatsi (the titular white lion) to a group of children around a campfire. At the end, we learn that the storyteller is Gisani, the Tsonga youth who followed Letsatsi on his journey.
- In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, George tells Nick the story about a boy he knew during his youth who accidentally killed both of his parents (his mother with a shotgun, and his father in a driving accident). When asked whatever came of the boy, George told him that as far as he knew, he was still in the asylum. This was not the case, the boy was George.
