I Am Not Spock / Live-Action Films

• Kirk Thatcher, an associate producer on Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, played a tiny, albeit memorable role in the film. He says his gravestone will read "Punk On Bus - Star Trek IV" even if he wins the Nobel Prize. He's apparently a good sport about it though, since he showed up as a similar if not the same punk in Star Trek: Picard.
• Harry Potter:
  • Regarding Alan Rickman, he took on the role of Severus Snape and so thoroughly claimed it that J. K. Rowling has admitted she started to picture the character looking like him in later books. Only time will tell if he can escape that shadow, especially with his death in 2016. Later on, Rickman had declined interviews, realizing that reporters were only going to ask about Snape. Earlier than that, he was due to be forever remembered as "the bad guy from Die Hard." Then again, his character's experience in the aforementioned Galaxy Quest probably helped him realize what he was up against.
  • Everybody began thinking of Marvin the Paranoid Android as "The Snape" after Rickman provided his voice.
  • Nearly all the actors to play Hogwarts students, helped no doubt by the fact that prior to being cast in the series, all of them were either unknowns or had simply never acted before, and that many of them are still only known for "Harry Potter". So when Daniel Radcliffe did Equus, it opened the floodgate for many "Harry shows his wand" jokes. The only exception is Cedric Diggory's actor Robert Pattinson, though only because he's instead Spocked as Edward Cullen, and also Barty Crouch Jr., as David Tennant is much more recognizable in a different role (though still sometimes sports the same Slasher Smile). Parodied in Get Him to the Greek, in which Tom Felton had a cameo appearance as himself with Jonah's character attempting to impress him by making lame Harry Potter jokes. Tom walked away in annoyance after a few seconds of this. See here. Emma Watson nearly left the series between the 5th and 6th films due to this.
  • Evanna Lynch is worth of a special mention: J. K. Rowling admitted that when she wrote the books none but one cast member of the movies' voice is heard inside her head and interfered with her writing process, and that cast member is Evanna. It is safe to say that instead of Evanna portraying Luna, Luna eventually became IRL Evanna.
  • Due to having an All-Star Cast play all the characters in the series, almost any high-profile British film made since about 1990 can be turned into a game of "spot the Harry Potter characters."
  • There is a generational aspect to it. If you're old enough to have known about Dame Maggie Smith before she was in Harry Potter, you might see her in Harry Potter and think "that's Maggie Smith." If you're part of the generation which grew up on Harry Potter, you might see her in another film and think "that's Professor McGonagall." In her case in particular, it works really well both ways since McGonagall is the sort of character she always plays. Although nowadays, there's also a sizable number of people who spock her as the Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey.
  • In a Toronto Star interview, Richard Harris, who played Dumbledore in the first two films, expressed concern that playing the role (something he hadn't initially wanted to do due to health issues, but was pressured into doing by his granddaughter) would overshadow the rest of his career. Following his death, whether or not that's happened is up for debate. His replacement Michael Gambon, like Maggie Smith, qualifies to the younger generation, although older audiences may know him from earlier works.
  • Although she's fairly well-known in the UK, Imelda Staunton can't escape being Professor Umbridge elsewhere.
  • Robbie Coltrane is Rubeus Hagrid to most Americans (Brits arguably still see him as Cracker), although others, both Americans and Brits, may know him from his role as Valentin Zukovsky in the Pierce Brosnan James Bond films.
  • Lucius Malfoy tends to overshadow the rest of Jason Isaacs' career, at least to Americans. Although previously Americans just knew him as "the bad guy from The Patriot (2000)." That said, it’s unknown if it truly bothers him given that interviews have him always speaking highly about playing Lucius and how grateful and lucky he was to be a part of the Harry Potter franchise. He tends to escape this in voice acting roles, though, like Admiral Zhao and Dick Dastardly, where few identify him as Lucius.
  • While Hermione is still her most famous role, and likely always will be, Emma Watson took huge steps to avoid this as soon as the films wrapped, cutting her hair short and taking vastly different roles in The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Bling Ring to shake off any Contractual Purity. She's also starred in the 2017 live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast.
• Robert Englund has been permanently Spocked as Freddy Krueger. To a lesser degree, he has also become typecast as a creepy/evil/weird guy in B-grade horror films. But these movies often feature Englund, and promote his inclusion, solely because of his "horror icon" status - which he gained from playing Freddy.
• The cast of Star Wars may Never Live It Down:
  • Mark Hamill could be said to suffer pretty badly from this. His role as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, while famous, wrecked his acting career in Hollywood, although he's done well in Broadway and theater since then. Some of the effect may stem from the facial scarring he picked up in an auto accident during the trilogy, which made him better as the maturing Luke in Empire and Jedi, but less bankable as a leading man. He has gained recognition as a voice actor though, and has been Spocked into his role as The Joker.
  • Carrie Fisher suffered from this. She once said that she didn't sleep around in her 20s because she didn't want guys running around saying, "Hey! I banged Princess Leia!" That said, her fame as Leia almost certainly helped launch her successful writing career. In addition, she seemingly embraced being Princess Leia. When called back to reprise her role over 30 years later for the sequel trilogy, she stated, "No, I’m a female and in Hollywood it’s difficult to get work after 30—maybe it’s getting to be 40 now. I long ago accepted that I am Princess Leia. I have that as a large part of the association with my identity. There wasn’t a lot of hesitation."
  • Anthony Daniels (C-3PO) is another Star Wars victim, although you'd have thought being entirely invisible and altering his normal speaking voice would have saved him. In an interview for the biggest Star Wars fanzine, Daniels says that he doesn't get recognized too often, just often enough that "It's very pleasant and joyful and rather sweet, but I also have my privacy." He also notes that there was a time, somewhere in the late '90s, when he'd wanted to just stop doing the character, but he changed his mind; overall, "Threepio has been very kind to me all these years."
  • And there's Sir Alec Guinness, who thought the script was terrible but did it purely for the money, and hated that people started identifying him entirely as Obi-Wan rather than acknowledging his vast film and stage career before the role. That said, his most prominent films with David Lean (The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia) remain perennial favorites among general audiences while, in the U.K., he's still remembered for his early Ealing Studios Comedies.
  • This is lampshaded in the Star Wars parody episode of Family Guy, when Peter Griffin, as Han Solo, introduces himself as "the only actor whose career wasn't destroyed by this movie." This is because Ford has one other very well known role.
  • Even while he's pitching Colt 45, Billy Dee Williams will always be Lando Calrissian. This was even played for laughs in Scrubs, as Turk keeps calling him Lando, despite his insistent cry of "Billy Dee!". Funnily enough, though, he's also somewhat prone to Adam Westing in TV shows (he's appeared as himself in Family Guy and Modern Family in addition to Scrubs), where he's fond of lampooning his image as an impossibly suave ladies' man.
  • David Prowse is well known mainly for the role of Darth Vader, in spite of the character's all-concealing helmet. It "helps" that he made himself so obnoxious at conventions (he was apparently banned from Lucasfilm-sponsored conventions for torquing off George Lucas himself) that the Star Wars community only grudgingly acknowledges his part in the films. In the UK he is also well-known for being the Green Cross Code man.
  • James Earl Jones was always more of a theater actor; he did a lot of Shakespeare, was one of the first African Americans to play Othello and debuted the role of Troy in August Wilson's Fences. While he will always be known as "the voice of Darth Vader (and Mufasa)", Vader was always a side-bit for him anyway. There are some who say that he eventually ended up Spocking himself again as the voice of CNN or the voice of Mufasa.
  • The Turn of the Millennium has shown how this trope isn't always a good thing for actors when they are best known for playing characters who are divisive at best or widely-hated at worst. Two actors in particular, Jake Lloyd and Ahmed Best, sadly suffered a lot of harassment over their roles as child Anakin Skywalker and Jar Jar Binks respectively:
    • Lloyd was horribly bullied at school, as well as suffering endless harassment from Star Wars "fans" and the media, from whom he was relentlessly bombarded with abuse that the movie he starred in and his role in it were the worst thing ever. Not good development-wise for a 10-year old. It almost certainly contributed to his later mental breakdown. He's since been in jail and psychiatric facilities and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
    • Ahmed Best, for his part, once contemplated suicide over the sheer amount of hate he received for playing the widely-despised Jar Jar. Thankfully, Best was able to make a comeback, not only returning to his character in Star Wars: The Clone Wars (which also worked to rescue Jar Jar from the scrappy heap; that said, he stepped away from the role for some time during the series' early production due to going through a Creator Breakdown from the backlash, and was temporarily Darrin'd by Phil Lamarr under a pseudonym), but also playing the role of Kelleran Beq in the YouTube children's game show Jedi Temple Challenge in 2020. And in turn, the fandom has warmed to him considerably since the days of The Phantom Menace.
  • In the time of the Sequel Trilogy, both Daisy Ridley and Kelly Marie Tran were bullied into quitting social media over their roles as Rey and Rose Tico respectively, thanks to the divisive nature of the Sequels. Since these two characters were Star-Making Roles for the pair of them, the association was very strong indeed.
• Basil Rathbone's an interesting case as he also played a lot of evil aristocrats in various swashbuckler films and in fact did an Affectionate Parody of this type-casting in the Danny Kaye film The Court Jester. While Rathbone might well have wanted to insist "I am not Sherlock Holmes", if Sherlock Holmes could talk to us he'd equally be saying "I am not Basil Rathbone"! So much of what is widely regarded as 'quintessential' Holmes does not come directly from Arthur Conan Doyle's original books but either originated in or is widely recognized from Rathbone's many portrayals of him: the iconic deerstalker hat, cape and pipe combination, as immortalised for instance in silhouette throughout the decor at Baker Street's London Underground station, are pure Rathbone-movie Holmes.
  • Strictly, the classical image of Homes (the physical appearance plus clothing such as the deer-stalker hat and Ulster coat) originated in print with Sidney Paget's illustrations of Conan Doyle's stories, long before Rathbone.
  • So much so that a number of reviews of Guy Ritchie's movie criticized Robert Downey Jr. for "not being faithful to the character", which 90% of the time translated to "he didn't play Holmes like Rathbone played him". If anything, Downey's Holmes is more faithful to the source material than Rathbone's, but more people have seen the films than read the original stories.
• A narrow escape: Before The Matrix, Keanu Reeves reportedly feared that his gravestone would read, "He played Ted". Now it will read "He played Neo, he also played Ted". (Although he probably would have also been remembered for Speed.)
  • Reeves now will also be remembered for playing John Wick.
• To most other people, Terence Stamp is Zod!!!
• The Wizard of Oz:
  • Bert Lahr will be always remembered as the Cowardly Lion despite every other role he played on screen and on stage.
  • Margaret Hamilton not only had severe trouble getting another job after her role as the Wicked Witch of the West, but spent a long time worried that it would give children the wrong idea of who she really was.^note She had been a schoolteacher prior to her acting career, and frequently donated to charitable causes It got to the point that a 1976 episode of Sesame Street was pulled from rebroadcast and never seen again until 2019 on account of her appearance in the show terrifying so many kids into "screams and tears" that their parents inundated the showrunners with angry letters—despite Hamilton having appeared as the Wicked Witch on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood just the year before, for the sole purpose of alleviating those very fears.
  • Judy Garland is kind of a retroactive example. She starred in many films during her lifetime, but most of them have since faded into obscurity. Oz has endured and now most people remember her only for Dorothy. If she's remembered for something other than Oz, it's Meet Me in St. Louis. It even affected the biopic Judy (2019), which seemed to present her as a One-Hit Wonder with that being her only big success; ignoring that she was a top Box Office draw throughout the 30s and 40s, not having a film lose money until The Pirate in 1948.
• Lucy Lawless is always going to be known first and foremost as Xena: Warrior Princess. Ironically, Lucy Lawless didn't typecast as Xena types - her later roles have been first on Roman epic Spartacus, and in 2013 she plays a disappointed refugee from suburbia in modern-day New Zealand (Top of the Lake). Oh, and of course a deeply religious quasi-human robot.
• While the falling quality of Frankenstein films caused Boris Karloff to stop working in them, he always acknowledged the fact that the Frankenstein monster was sole reason he became a successful actor. He also took being typecast as a compliment, since it meant everyone thought he was better than anyone else in a specific type of role. Karloff did grow annoyed at the low quality of many movies offered to him, joking that Val Lewton "rescued me from the living dead" by casting him in The Body Snatcher. One of the last films he made, Targets, is in part a study on Karloff's career and the typecasting he faced; his character is Boris Karloff with the serial numbers filed off.
• Anthony Perkins. "Norman, is that you?"
• Back to the Future:
  • Michael J. Fox has starred on not one, but two successful sitcoms, Family Ties and Spin City. He'll still be Marty McFly for all eternity.
  • Stand-up comedian Thomas F. Wilson will always be best known as Biff Tannen. A 2013 comedy album released by Wilson starts out by invoking this trope, as he goes over all the most well-known lines from the movie. He also sings a song called "The Question Song", in which he lampshades on how people keep asking him the most common questions...
  "Do you all hang out together?" No we don't.
  "How's Crispin Glover?" Never talked to him.
  "Back to the Future 4?" Not happening!
  Stop asking me the question!
  • In a particularly extreme case of this, Eric Stoltz is mostly remembered as the guy who was originally cast as Marty McFly. Only a few snippets of Stoltz as Marty have ever been released, so he's literally best known for a role that the public has never really seen him play!
• Linda Blair, The Exorcist. Especially tragic because she was a child when the typecasting happened^note Made even worse by people accosting her in public for 'being evil' because (on top of exemplifying this trope) they didn't understand that her character was a victim of Demonic Possession, and later got into drugs. She later spoofed her Exorcist role in Repossessed. She might be remembered among 2000s kids as Joni the landlady from S Club 7's TV series.
• Believe it or not, even Max von Sydow was at one time Spocked as Father Merrin from The Exorcist (at least in America), and was discarded by several casting agents who had seen the movie and believed he was twenty years older than he was.
• The Karate Kid (1984):
  • Pat Morita is known to most as Mr. Miyagi. (Before that, he was Arnold from Happy Days.) It is even played with in an episode of Robot Chicken. "First of all, [I'm not Miyagi] I'm Pat Effin' Morita, you nutsack!". It was even lampooned in a Simpsons comic where Homer identifies Morita as "the little guy from Happy Days" rather than Miyagi.
  • Ralph Macchio will always be Daniel-San.
  • There's also William Zabka, who will always be Johnny Lawrence - to the point where he made a career out of blond bullies. He has taken it quite well, though, and continues to willingly talk about Johnny. The last two seasons of How I Met Your Mother featured him Adam Westing as himself after Barney revealed that he always saw Johnny as the hero of the film.
    • This eventually led to the 2018 YouTube series Cobra Kai, a Sequel Series starring Johnny and Daniel decades later, with both actors reprising their roles. Jacob Bertrand is probably very thankful he landed the show; otherwise he'd likely forever be known as Kirby Buckets. (And to some people, he still is Kirby Buckets)
• Kevin Bacon suffered from this to the point where he would dread the eventuality of being asked to dance to Footloose. During an appearance on The Graham Norton Show they were kind enought to let him sit and watch the entire audience do it instead. He was later associated with the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, and any guest appearances of him on a sitcom will allude to this. To the extent that as of late 2012/13 he appears in advertisements on British television capitalising on this trope.
• While Tim Curry may have gained a good-sized cult following for his roles as Pennywise the Dancing Clown and The Lord of Darkness, it's safe to assume that most people will automatically picture him in fishnets, corset, and high heels whenever his name is mentioned. It even got to the point where he became very reluctant to talk about being in Rocky Horror for years since the fans started to creep him out, and he even went so far as to put on weight in order to distance himself from the role. That said, whenever he appears in something else, he's just Tim Curry.
• Megan Fox will probably be remembered as "that hot chick from Transformers". At the very least, that's how she's known now and considering her attitude towards Michael Bay, she's probably not very happy about it. As it had turned out, her issues with Bay seemed to have been resolved (turns out she had offended someone higher up than Bay and Bay didn't have a choice but to fire her) and is starring in Bay's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in 2014; so she'll probably remembered for being "the hot chick in those Michael Bay movies". She is also as "the chick who made out with Amanda Seyfried."
• Ron Livingston will always be either "that guy from Office Space" or Captain Nixon. He even said in an interview once that he had trouble getting another acting job for several years after the former because producers thought he wouldn't be able to act differently than that character.
• Pulp Fiction:
  • Perhaps not for the public at large, but for many nerds, "starring Samuel L. Jackson" actually means "starring Jules Winfield". It's the entire reason why Jackson's line "Enough is enough! I've had it with these motherfuckin' snakes on this motherfuckin' plane!" was inserted into Snakes on a Plane. However, he has begun escaping this with iconic roles like Mace Windu and Nick Fury.
  • Ving Rhames has played many roles in his career but he's all but synonymous with Marsellus Wallace.
• John Cho:
  • Though he's slowly but surely edging away from the association because of Star Trek (2009), John Cho is still known by many as Harold. His character is based on a real life Harold Lee, who was a friend of the writers. Cho became friends with the real Harold Lee, and has said that when they're hanging out in public, someone will yell "Harold!" and they'll both turn around.
  • Cho has also stated in interviews that before he was known as "Harold," people would recognize him from American Pie and shout "MILF!" He regarded it as an upgrade to be known by an actual name as opposed to a catch phrase. But Cho may turn it around, ironically, as the second Mr. Sulu in Star Trek (2009) continuity, a role that is still forever associated with George Takei.
• Except for Ashley Tisdale, everyone from High School Musical is bound to go through this eventually, with Zac Efron already showing signs of it. Ultimately though, Efron is mainly recognized as himself rather than Troy Bolton these days.
• Apparently, Christopher Plummer went back and forth on this. On QI Stephen Fry told a story about how a friend of his met him and was told in hushed voices by the guy who picked him up at the airport not to mention The Sound of Music under any circumstances, "...and half an hour later he was playing 'Edelweiss' at the piano." It doesn't help his case that Julie Andrews was one of his closest friends. Kind of ironic when he reportedly said that working with her "is like being hit over the head with a giant Valentine's Day card."
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • Elijah Wood isn't the only cast member to fall victim to this. Viggo Mortensen will always be Aragorn. Before that, he played a pretty good Lucifer. And watching him play opposite of Christopher Walken was fun.
    "I could lay you out and fill your mouth with your mother's feces. Or, we could talk."
  • Sean Astin is Samwise when he's not Mikey. Or Raphael.
  • Ian McKellen has largely managed to escape being forever known as Gandalf by becoming forever as Magneto instead - a role, remarkably, that he was playing at the same time as the Rings films were coming out. He also nearly became Dumbledore after Richard Harris' death, which would have meant that he essentially cornered the market on some of the most iconic fictional characters ever, but turned it down partly for this reason and partly because Harris had criticised him and he didn't feel it would be right to take on the role.
• Macaulay Culkin will likely never escape being known as "The Home Alone Kid". When he tried to branch out by playing a young psychopath in The Good Son there was angry backlash from concerned parents because of the family-friendly image he got from Home Alone. There was similar controversy during the release of My Girl due to the fact that Culkin's character dies at the end, and Moral Guardians feared that children would think that little Kevin McAllister bit the dust.
• Michael Sheen will probably have to do a lot to avoid being seen as Tony Blair, considering he's played the former Prime Minister three times.
• American Pie:
  • To some, Eugene Levy is most known for being Jim's dad in the movies (partly because he kept taking roles in that series) but lately he claims he's more recognized as Johnny Rose from Schitt's Creek, a more suave character but one still prone to awkwardly supportive encounters with his adult children.
  • Jason Biggs too, will always be remembered as "the dude who fucked a pie".
  • Similarly, Jennifer Coolidge will always be Stifler's Mom.
  • And Seann William Scott as Stifler.
• Christopher Mintz-Plasse has said in interviews that he is trying to avoid being only known for McLovin. Not even Fogell. Only McLovin.
• Twilight:
  • Kristen Stewart is close to be permanently remembered as Bella Swan. Which is strange when you consider that the role was meant to be a place-holder for audience members. Ironically, the reason she may be remembered for it is because being a place-holder made the character look shallow and naive.
  • Taylor Lautner is either Wolf Boy (Jacob) or Shark Boy (or else just that hot guy from that one movie with his shirt off all the time). He also seems to be the member of the trio most okay with the whole Twilight phenomenon.
• Harold Ramis was a versatile comedy writer and director whose career includes SCTV, Animal House, Caddyshack, Stripes and several other classic comedies. When he died, headlines read "Harold Ramis, Egon from Ghostbusters, Has Died."
• Sylvester Stallone was well on his way to being Rocky forever and ever. Now he's Rocky and Rambo, and maybe Judge Dredd, otherwise known as "action guy who talks funny, (and isn't Ahnold.)" Ironically, he was initially touted as "the next Marlon Brando" because of how well he played Rocky, the critics being unaware that he was playing himself.
• Peter Weller will always be RoboCop, or, to a relatively small cross-section of fanboys, Buckaroo Banzai.
• Nearly the entire cast of Withnail and I, much to Richard Griffiths' disgust (not so much that he dislikes the film, but more because sharp financial practices by the production company, HandMade Films, have meant that he never received money owed to him). The current generation will probably think "Hey, it's Vernon!" whenever they see Griffiths nowadays.
• Burt Ward had this forced on him. Director Mike Nichols wanted him for a movie, and Burt was quite keen to take it, but his bosses didn't want Robin's character diluted by seeing the same actor in a different role, so they wouldn't let him. He writes in his autobiography that every time he's seen that director since, the man laments that he wanted Burt for that role. As of writing said autobiography Burt's still annoyed. And the role? Ben Braddock of The Graduate, the role that propelled Dustin Hoffman to stardom.
• William Boyd did this one to himself. Best known for playing the straight-arrow cowboy Hopalong Cassidy, Cecil B Demille wanted to have Boyd play Moses in The Ten Commandments as the name recognition would be sure to bring in a large crowd. Boyd politely refused, fearing that nobody would take "Hopalong Moses" as seriously as the film demanded. The role went to Charlton Heston. And, at any rate, back in 1948, Boyd had bought all the rights lock, stock and barrel to the Cassidy character, and so for once typecasting was sort of in an actor's best financial interest.
• A classic example: In the end, Bela Lugosi was Dracula, no matter what he did. However, it was his son and his fifth wife, not Lugosi himself, who decided to have him buried in a Dracula cloak. Even Lugosi's friends and coworkers couldn't help but typecast him. Vincent Price wrote in his autobiography that at Lugosi's funeral, Peter Lorre, observing the cape, turned to Price and asked, "Should we stick a stake in his heart just to be sure?"
  • The poor man gets it after death too. A prominent American "spirit medium" alleges that Lugosi's ghost is forever tied to the mausoleum where his body was laid to rest, and this has naturally led to "ghost hunters" staking out the grave and even breaking into the grounds of his former home, Castle La Paloma, to see if they can catch a post-mortem glimpse of the great man in his Dracula persona. The same medium also alleged that "black magic rites" had been practiced in grounds of the house; once this idea was out there in the minds of mentally fragile people, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as unbalanced people tried to ressurect Lugosi as a vampire.
  • In the '60s and '70s, Christopher Lee was Dracula. In the mid' 70s, he decided that this was an undesirable thing and dissociated himself from the character. He has been fairly successful in this as time has passed - younger film watchers are more likely to think of him as Saruman or Count Dooku. In the last years of his life, Lee traded this for Typecasting as authoritative villains, including King Haggard and the grouchy bishop in Corpse Bride. Lee's distaste for the Dracula character wasn't all due to this — he also got fed up with Hammer trying to keep him in the role film after film with little to no pay raises by claiming they'd have to put all the crew and staff on the street if he didn't stay on.
• Rowan Atkinson will always be Mr. Bean in the U.S. and Germany, despite an amazing career as the title character in Blackadder and a variety of other film and stage roles. It's only the select few that knew Blackadder before Mr. Bean came out who know he did other work.
  • The Brazilian poster of the movie Rat Race^note ...or Everybody's Crazy! in this case goes further by crediting his name as "Mr. Bean". Also the Mexican TV promos for the film remarked him as "Mr. Bean".
• Most of the Power Rangers:
  • Johnny Yong Bosch escaped this fate by becoming a well known voice actor.
  • Although Amy Jo Johnson is still doing well in showbiz, she feels that her role as the first Pink Ranger is something that she can never live down. She's said she's pretty okay with that, though, and made a Remake Cameo in Power Rangers (2017) with...
  • Jason David Frank will always be Tommy. He's perfectly fine with that to the point where he had custom suits made of the White and Green Rangers for him to wear at conventions and photo ops. He also holds a Power Rangers boot camp and throws Green Ranger images on his merchandise. His dojos are also filled with memorabilia. In the MMA, he's even nicknamed the "Green Ranger", with one opponent he defeated lamenting "He could've at least Morphed before he took me on". Even after leaving the main cast during Turbo, he has returned to the role of Tommy multiple times, including as a main character in Dino Thunder, voicing Tommy and his Evil Counterpart Lord Drakkon in Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid, and for guest appearances in Wild Force, Super Megaforce, and Ninja Steel.
  • Dan Ewing appeared on Dancing with the Stars Australia - that proves how successful he is. The RPM black ranger is better known now as a cast member in Home and Away.
  • Emma Lahana recently expressed annoyance at fans who constantly conflated her with her character from Power Rangers: Dino Thunder, Kira. There were a number of fans who misinterpreted this as her hating the character.
  • On the Sentai side, Baku Hatakeyama, the original Yellow Ranger, became unable to find work because of this. He ended up committing suicide as a result.
• Gabourey Sidibe used her monologue while hosting Saturday Night Live to explain how she is nothing like her character Precious, and that she does in fact live a normal, well adjusted life having grown up in a loving family with both parents. Fortunately she seems to be escaping it with Empire.
• James Bond:
  • For most people, Roger Moore is James Bond - or at least one of several James Bonds - although he also played Lord Brett Sinclair, and some older British viewers think of him primarily as Simon Templar from the '60s TV series The Saint. Moore famously parodied this trope by playing obvious spoofs of his Bond, such as in Cannonball Run where he plays a character who pretends to be Roger Moore and acts like James Bond.
  • Sean Connery had to let his hair turn gray and grow a beard to not be James Bond anymore.
  • Pierce Brosnan went through it even before playing the role, as he was identified as far back as Remington Steele as "the next/real James Bond" by his fans. He was offered the part for The Living Daylights after Remington Steele was cancelled, but the news about it revived interest and the show was renewed.
  • On a related note of Bond henchman, Harold Sakata appeared in later films with the credit of "Oddjob."
    • Similarly, Yang Sze, who played Bolo in Enter the Dragon, now goes by the name of Bolo Yeung.
• William Atherton will always be Walter "Dickless" Peck. Word of God says this plagued him for a long time, as he'd have people yell "Hey, Dickless!" wherever he went. Unless you remember him as Jerry Hathaway or Dick Thornburg, who are both also Jerkasses.
• The Lone Ranger:
  • Clayton Moore (the Lone Ranger), although he was apparently comfortable enough with the role to maintain kayfabe that Moore was the Ranger in his personal life. He worked with it which is recounted annually on Letterman where he was being giving a ride to his hotel by two young men in the '60s after a personal appearance when they were hit by another car. The driver of the other car insisted that he was not at fault and asked who the cops would believe, him or a couple of hippies. Moore reportedly then got out of the car, in full Ranger get-up and announced "They'll believe me, citizen!" This story was told on The Late Show with David Letterman by Jay Thomas, who is perhaps best remembered by many viewers as Eddie LeBec.
  • Jay Silverheels admited to having a Love/Hate relationship with Tonto; liking the character as a whole but disliking the pidgin speaking style he had to do for the role. In a comedic 1969 interview with Johnny Carson, Silverheels, acting in character as Tonto, said he worked for the Lone Ranger for "thirty lousy years."
• Reese Witherspoon briefly had this problem after Election — her performance as the crazy, controlling Tracy Flick was so good that producers thought that that was her real personality, and she had trouble getting work for a few years afterward. Later roles helped her break out of that typecasting.
• Tom "Tiny" Lister, who was cast as Hulk Hogan's antagonist Zeus in the movie No Holds Barred, became so associated with the character that it was worked into a WWF storyline. All of his subsequent acting roles had him credited as Tiny "Zeus" Lister until he became Deebo. He was even credited in The Fifth Element as simply "Zeus."
• Joseph Mazzello: Most famous for playing Tim in Jurassic Park, today he's found on The Pacific, The Social Network, and Bohemian Rhapsody as John Deacon.
• Vince Vaughn nailed his role in Swingers. Rave reviews, the next golden goose. Now he can't play anything else (except one creepy murder role). See also: Old School, Wedding Crashers, DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story and Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005).
• Sigourney Weaver shall always be Ellen Ripley. Galaxy Quest had fun with this. A certain generation knows her well as Dana Barrett.
• Jack Webb was Sgt. Joe Friday. He even received an LAPD funeral on his death, though he never served, and Joe's Badge 714 was officially retired.
• Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa will always be Shang Tsung for many people, no matter how many nice grandpas he plays. There's something about that fierce stare. He's cool with it, though, even coming back to voice the character in Mortal Kombat 11.
• For viewers old enough to see the original release of Star Wars without an accompanying parent, George Burns is God. For moviegoers of a younger vintage, Morgan Freeman fills that role.
• Gary Sinise has been so strongly identified as Lieutenant Dan Taylor in Forrest Gump that he called his band "The Lt. Dan Band." He has also played Lt. Dan in PSAs for suicide hotlines aimed at military veterans. In fact, Taylor made such an impression on Sinise that he has become a notable and outspoken advocate for veterans' issues ever since.^note Actually, his advocacy began back in the mid 1970s during his Steppenwolf Theater days; he just took it up to eleven after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. (He also last-named his character on CSI: NY after him.)
• Jim Caviezel will always be known as Jesus in The Passion of the Christ. However, he doesn't seem to mind. He considers the role his calling, and it changed him. For later fans he may also be John Reese.
• Frank Oz is an interesting case. He has refused to use his Muppet voices in public, and has for the most part refused to reprise his roles, the characters Darrin'd by Eric Jacobson (with the exception of his Sesame Street characters, which he has reprised on occasion). Beyond that and voicing Yoda for the prequels, he focuses on his directing career, but despite directing several excellent films, he will forever be known as Ms. Piggy and Fozzie Bear, much to his chagrin. This caused some problems when he filmed The Score with Marlon Brando, which Brando kept mocking Oz, such as calling him "Ms. Piggy" and other derogatory references to his puppeteering career. It got to the point where co-star Robert De Niro had to step in to direct Brando's scenes. Needless to say, this was the last time Brando worked in Hollywood again. But that doesn't mean he can anymore.
• The late Bill McKinney was so strongly recognized as the mountain man who sodomized Ned Beatty in Deliverance that it cost him the opportunity to star as Gunnery Sgt. Hartman in Full Metal Jacket. Stanley Kubrick didn't want to meet with him because he was that scared of him. R. Lee Ermey, however, remains Gunnery Sgt. Hartman. However, may not be a straight example because Ermey actually was in the military (Marine Corps) and lends his voice to other military-based roles (Toy Story, cameos on The Simpsons and X-Men: The Last Stand).
• Time will tell if Jim Parsons, Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, can break out of this. When Parsons guest hosted Saturday Night Live his opening monologue is a song called "I'm Not That Guy" about how he isn't Sheldon Cooper, along with cameos by (SNL regulars playing) other typecast actors such as Jaleel White from Family Matters. The same could easily be said about the rest of the cast, especially Johnny Galecki and Kayley Cuoco (who were already established actors prior to the show), as well as Mayim Bialik, previously known as Blossom.
• Thomas Lennon continues to play roles similar to Lt. Jim Dangle from Reno 911!, although not as a police officer.
• Callie Thorne, who played Sheila Keefe in Rescue Me, mentioned in an interview that fans act wary when they meet her, expecting her to be as crazy as the character she plays.
• Paul Gross will probably always be identified with Due South, and it was rather a shock to many fans when he played a completely different type of Mountie, real-life accused killer Patrick Kelly, in the docudrama Murder Most Likely.
• The entire cast of The Andy Griffith Show. A few got around it. Don Knotts is also remembered for The Incredible Mr. Limpet and Three's Company, and Ron Howard is known for Happy Days as well as his directoral projects. Griffith himself got around it with Matlock, though he was catering to approximately the same crowd that watched him on The Andy Griffith Show. Frances Bavier, however, was stuck as Aunt Bea.
• Dick Van Dyke and The Dick Van Dyke Show, though he escaped it somewhat with Mary Poppins and, much later, Diagnosis: Murder.
  • All the other main Dick Van Dyke Show cast members as well. Mary Tyler Moore was known so well as Laura Petrie that the producers of The Mary Tyler Moore Show decided not to have Mary Richards be divorced, as fans would think that she was divorced from Rob.
• Ted Knight struggled with this quite a bit during and after the run of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. People couldn't separate him from Ted Baxter and he hated it.
  • Betty White was known so well as Sue Ann Nivens that she was asked initially to play Blanche on The Golden Girls.
  • Ed Asner as Lou Grant. It didn't help that he also played the character in a spin-off (where Lou Grant became a newspaper editor). He was so well-known for it that he even guest-edited at least one real life newspaper. Though people who were kids/teens in the 90s might think of him as Cosgrove or J. Jonah Jameson (before J. K. Simmons stole the character right out from under him).
• The Golden Girls itself has this. Betty White has gotten around it the most out of all of them, thanks to the aforementioned role of Sue Ann Nivens (plus her numerous other appearances). Meanwhile, Bea Arthur is also remembered for being Maude.
• Leslie Nielsen as either the doctor from Airplane! or Frank Drebin. Most people don't know he ever had a dramatic career.
• Nielsen's Airplane! co-star Peter Graves came out way worse, with some Fan Dumb assuming that he was a pedophile (and not just playing an implied one in a movie). One time, a mother in a supermarket even run to retrieve her son from being in his vicinity.
• One television critic described a version of this phenomenon as "The Curse of The House of Windsor" — once he'd seen an actor playing a member of the Royal Family, he'd still see them as that Royal in their subsequent roles.
• It has been figuratively etched in stone that no amount of Oscar Bait can even so much as chip away at: Christian Bale is Batman.^note And, to a lesser extent, the "Do you like Phil Collins?" guy.
• Michael Keaton is either Betelgeuse or the Tim Burton Batman to most people. The two Batman films had more impact on his career however, as he couldn't get any high profile work for years after he stopped playing the role. This is the reason he was cast as Riggan Thompson in Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)- a washed up actor known for playing a superhero years ago. Ironically, this role seems to have finally broken him out of it. Of course, before being cast as Batman, he was typecast as the amiable slacker protagonist thanks to films like Gung Ho and Mr. Mom. He seems to have embraced his Bat-connection more in recent years, notably proclaiming "I'm Batman" at various public appearances, to the extent that he took on the cape and cowl again starting with The Flash (2023).
• Fans of Mara Wilson have been known to address her on Twitter as "Matilda" (despite her having also been in Mrs. Doubtfire, years after she quit acting. In August 2012, she lampshaded this fact by pointing fans on Twitter to this very page. Somewhat ironically, Mara has said that she is very similar to Matilda in terms of personality, which is why she chose to play the role in the first place. Before playing Matilda, Mara also had to deal with people assuming she was as cute and sweet as her character Susan in Miracle on 34th Street.
• Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory:
  • Gene Wilder seems to be an interesting case. He was well-known for memorable (and quotable) roles in Young Frankenstein and the original movie version of The Producers, and a series of films pairing him with Richard Pryor, but his (currently) best known role, playing Willy Wonka, was not even a financial success at first. The film later became Vindicated by Cable through repeat showings on HBO and TBS. The Wonka "cult" seemed to grow enough by The '90s that Wilder's role in Will & Grace incorporated Wonka's "Strike that, reverse that" Catchphrase. And this trope was partly why his family didn't publicly disclose that he'd been battling Alzheimer's disease till after he died in 2016, because they didn't want his youngest fans to worry about "poor old Mr. Wonka" and feel sad for him when they saw him in public.
  • When he was still alive, Jack Albertson was best known for Chico and the Man. More than 30 years after his death, "Chico" is largely forgotten and Grandpa Joe is the role he is now most remembered for.
• While Peter Sellers avoided this by playing famous roles other than Inspector Jacques Clouseau, the same is not quite as true for the rest of the cast, save David Niven and Robert Wagner.
• Long-time fans of Hugh Jackman know him as having a rich, established Theater career. Everyone else knows him as Wolverine. Given that he played the character in seven films, with two additional cameos, over 17 years, including three entirely about the character, this is not remotely surprising. His attempt to become Jean Valjean/24601 has been met with comments about Wolverine singing. It hasn't stopped him getting roles in other productions, though, and he always seemed happy enough to come back as Wolverine.
• The Marvel Cinematic Universe has a problem with this, though not as big as some.
  • Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark: "I am Iron Man". He seems to be okay with this, though. Enough that he once remarked that, "Someone should tell Chris Evans NOT to take his role so seriously that he actually thinks he is Captain America. Like I think I'm Tony Stark right now. It's a problem. Ask my wife."
  • Fortunately, being the Human Torch saves Evans from this status - in theory. In reality, thanks to the relative dud nature of both Fantastic Four films and the spectacular flop of the 2015 reboot, he's pretty much entirely identified as Captain America, something not helped by the fact that he seems to have embraced the idea.
  • Chris Hemsworth, despite appearing in films like Snow White & the Huntsman since, was a relative newcomer when he was cast as Thor and that, plus a decade playing the character, mean that he has essentially become Thor. Since the character's undergone Character Development that allows Hemsworth to show off his comic acting range, he seems to be fine with that.
  • Tom Hiddleston has largely escaped this, thanks to taking a wide variety of roles that are nothing like Loki, though he does love the character (and has been known to ham up to it at cons and events). If anything, he's mostly become famous for being himself, aquiring a personal and somewhat rabid fandom.
  • Chadwick Boseman had a wide, varied and successful career before and after being cast as T'Challa, which allowed him to mostly avoid this. However, his instantly iconic and regal take means that to most audiences, he will always be known as the Black Panther, and Marvel flat-out refused to recast him after his untimely death. In the long term, it probably wouldn't have stuck exclusively, but it's notable that most of the tributes focused on his role as T'Challa. He seemed to enjoy the role, though apparently he, like the rest of the cast, got annoyed at everyone doing the Wakandan Salute at him.
• Noomi Rapace doesn't want anything to do with Lizbeth Salander anymore. According to a New York Times article, as soon as she finished shooting her last scene in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, she ran to the bathroom and vomited for 45 minutes straight as a way of purging the character from her body. Rooney Mara hasn't been affected the same way; then again, Mara has only finished one of the three films. Michael Nyqvist also falls into "I Am Not Spock" territory.
• Most people will automatically think of the Spider-Man Trilogy when they see Tobey Maguire, the Amazing Spider-Man movies when they see Andrew Garfield, and the MCU Spider-Man when they see Tom Holland. So far, none of them seem to have a problem with it, with Holland (who was previously well known in British theatre circles for his role as Billy Elliot on the West End) hoping to continue playing the role for another however many films after his contract runs out after Spider-Man: No Way Home, despite the risk of this phenomenon.
• R. Lee Ermey made a decent career playing almost nothing but expies of his first ever film character, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket.
• Raúl Juliá was a respected actor who had appeared in dozens of Broadway, film and television productions, but to much of today's audience, Julia will forever be remembered and recognized as Gomez Addams and M. Bison.
• Until she became Rogue, Anna Paquin was a child star who couldn't escape the shadow of her Oscar from The Piano.
• Tatiana Maslany escapes this by playing at least twelve characters on Orphan Black. But instead, people see her as "Orphan Black".^note "Orphan Black" is not a collective in-universe name for the clones, hence the pothole.
• Cuba Gooding Jr. is best known as Rod Tidwell from Jerry Maguire, or worse, the "Show me the money!" guy. Renée Zellweger also had a tough time escaping the shadow of the film until she landed Bridget Jones' Diary. Nevertheless, "you had me at hello" remains her greatest cultural footprint.
• Alicia Silverstone is all but synonymous with Cher Horowitz.
• Despite Rachel McAdams' successful career, to most millennials she'll always be best known as Regina George. Amanda Seyfried, Lacey Chabert, Lizzy Caplan, Jonathan Bennett, and Tim Meadows have also been hit hard with this. Even Seyfried's massive success in The New '10s doesn't change the fact that her most iconic role is Karen Smith. Lindsay Lohan actually escaped this; while Cady Heron is certainly her most iconic role, people still know her best as washed-up child star Lindsay Lohan.
• While Keanu Reeves certainly escaped the shadow of Bill & Ted, Alex Winter did not. 25 years later and he's still synonymous with Bill S. Preston Esquire. This is partially due to the fact that Winter retired from acting in the early-1990s and concentrated on filmmaking; he returned to acting with Bill & Ted Face the Music.
• John Hurt is known for many things: The Elephant Man, Hazel, a version of Caligula, The War Doctor, and Adam Sutler. But he will always be known as the most definitive version of Winston Smith, the guy who gave birth to an Alien, and, to younger generations, Mr. Ollivander.
• Alexa Vega and Daryl Sabara = Carmen and Juni Cortez.
• Some conservative Americans don't seem to realize that Bradley Cooper, who played Chris Kyle in American Sniper, is not a conservative like Chris, but rather a Democratic Party supporter who has also been in films that most conservatives would balk like Wedding Crashers and The Hangover.
• This can sometimes affect actors who are part of separate franchises - where their character in one will end up changing to match that of the one in the more successful franchise:
  • Chris Hemsworth as Thor. Notably in Snow White & the Huntsman he played a depressed brooder. By the time of the sequel The Huntsman: Winter's War, Eric is suddenly a lot goofier and Thor with a Scottish accent. He also engages in some Adam Westing of his role as the Dumb Muscle in Ghostbusters (2016).
  • Jennifer Lawrence played Mystique in X-Men: First Class and Katniss in The Hunger Games. The latter truly made her a household name, and had an effect on Mystique's characterization too. Her performances between First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past are drastically different - where in the latter she's a far more heroic character than Mystique has ever historically been. By X-Men: Apocalypse she has even become an inspiration to young mutants, much in the same way that Katniss has. Jennifer's character in the film Joy (2015) also undergoes an Adrenaline Makeover to become more Katniss-like.
• Jamie Lee Curtis fell headlong into this in the early 80s. The success of Halloween (1978) typecast her as a Final Girl, and all her roles in horror films were essentially Laurie Strode with a different hairstyle. Playing a Hooker with a Heart of Gold in Trading Places helped her escape it and True Lies later got her out for good. Years later she would affirm that she and Laurie were virtually nothing alike - and that she had more in common with the character Lynda in the first Halloween movie. Even into middle age, she reprised her role as Laurie in various Halloween reunion films; making her the rare actress in a horror franchise to portray a character as a teenager, mother and grandmother across various films.
• Kate Beckinsale achieved stardom with the Underworld (2003) franchise, and she later commented that this had the effect of making people assume she was either as cold and humourless as Selene or as dainty and fragile as some of her earlier English Rose characters. In reality, she's a notorious prankster with a wicked sense of humour.
• Deborah Kerr is unique in that she got Spocked not necessarily for one role, but for a collection of roles. Her initial films in Hollywood all had her playing a Proper Lady who, in her own words was "high-minded, long-suffering, white-gloved and decorative". It took a steamy Fanservice scene in From Here to Eternity to show people that she did have more range than that. Still, a good portion of her roles after that were nuns, governesses and various English Roses. While filming Heaven Knows Mr Allison Robert Mitchum assumed she would be as stiff and uptight as her characters - with the result than when Deborah swore after getting a take wrong, he nearly drowned laughing. This was, as they say, the start of a beautiful friendship — they went on to star in three more films together, and she was by his own account his favourite leading lady.
• Neve Campbell is still synonymous with Sydney Prescott in the eyes of the public. Some people may remember her more fondly as Julia Salinger, however.
• Ben Affleck is a curious victim of this after signing on to play Batman in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. His own son apparently was convinced that he was actually Batman - to the degree that whenever he left the house, the son asked "you're going to the Bat Cave right?" - and apparently frequently mistakes Fed-Ex delivery guys for the Joker (as the uniform is the same colour). Thus Ben has to pay the delivery guy $20 to stage a fight on the lawn for his son's benefit.
• Amy Adams is frequently recognised by young fans of Enchanted. While she claims to be a lot like Giselle in terms of personality, one thing she doesn't share is the Unlimited Wardrobe of Pimped Out Dresses. So when the children are disappointed to see her not in the finery, she tends to put on the Giselle voice and say "I'm in disguise."
  "It's better than me getting down and saying 'it's not real, honey'."
• French actress Mathilda May is best known internationally as the infamous Space Girl from Lifeforce (1985) no doubt due to the nature of the character she played (a humanoid vampire bat-like alien that takes the appearance of an ultra gorgeous 19 years old girl that spends 90% of her screen time in her birthday suit. The usual tropes are in full effect here.) as well as the fact that May's movie career takes place mostly in the European market and specially in her native France, making her rather unknown globally).
• John Kerr quit acting and became a lawyer later in life, but was remembered for being the Ambiguously Gay teenager who eventually snogs his coach's wife in Tea and Sympathy. He later was surprised that The Pit and the Pendulum ended up becoming a Cult Classic, and the film he was asked most about.
• Laurence Fishburne got icy glares from women for months after the success of What's Love Got to Do with It (1993), where he played domestic abuser Ike Turner a little too well.
• Ryan Reynolds spent his career being known as a Nice Guy hero in rom-coms or a straight-up Action Hero (in Green Lantern (2011), which he frequently mocks). He is now almost exclusively known as Deadpool. Many audiences facetiously describe his non-Deadpool movies as Deadpool teaming up with Nick Fury or Deadpool as a Pikachu. That said, this isn't a bad thing since Reynolds genuinely enjoys playing Deadpool and will find as many excuses to keep playing the character. If anything, playing the "Merc with a Mouth" revived his acting career, and the success of the Deadpool movies meant he'll still be playing the character even after the X-Men movies were rebooted following the Disney-Fox merger.
• Nauton Wayne and Basil Radford, who played comic relief characters Charters and Caldicot in The Lady Vanishes, and subsequently played these roles or very similar ones in eleven other films. Wayne once lamented that even the filmmakers made this mistake; sometimes they wouldn't be given a proper script, but just told to "be themselves".
• Nancy Kwan for The World of Suzie Wong - where she went from unknown to prominent Asian actress in Hollywood. Although she appeared in notable hits like Flower Drum Song and The Wrecking Crew, she's best remembered as Suzie Wong. Well over fifty years later, she still got letters about it. At the time, people would even call her father "Mr Wong". She's not too bothered though (and even turned down a role in The Joy Luck Club because the script had a Take That! to Suzie).
• Hayley Mills may have been a big child star and part of the acclaimed Mills dynasty, but you'd be surprised how heavily she's identified with her first Hollywood role - the title character in Pollyanna (1960). Especially ironic, considering the film was a Box Office disappointment at the time. The book has been adapted many other times, but the Disney version is most remembered, and Hayley Mills is the definitive Pollyanna for many. Her other famous role - The Parent Trap (1961) - is slightly eclipsed by the 1998 remake with Lindsay Lohan. So Pollyanna she'll remain.
• Speaking of The Parent Trap (1998):
  • Natasha Richardson was already an accomplished performer on stage and film, but her work wasn't exactly mainstream. The Parent Trap was her highest grossing film, and when she died in 2008, she was listed as "the mother from The Parent Trap."
  • Elaine Hendrix is remembered only for playing Meredith Blake, the evil girlfriend.
• Olivia Olson, who played Sam's love interest Joanna in Love Actually, says she's often asked why she never did anything else after the film. She's quick to counter with her extensive voice acting resume (including Phineas and Ferb and Adventure Time).
• Olivia Hussey referred to herself as this in her autobiography, titling it The Girl on the Balcony, and saying in the introduction that someone is likely only reading the book because they knew her from Romeo and Juliet (1968). This however was memorably subverted for her when meeting Steve Martin about a part; he said she'd been in one of his favorite movies that he'd seen 22 times - Black Christmas (1974). From the same film, Leonard Whiting chose to focus on stage work in the 1970s and thus is best known as Romeo (whereas Olivia Hussey has been in many other notable projects).
• Fredi Washington was never able to get many roles in Hollywood thanks to movie studios' racism in the 1930s. So she was best known as Peola from Imitation of Life (1934). As she became an avid Civil Rights activist, she had to keep fighting claims that she had tried to pass for white like Peola - pointing out that she was just playing a character.
• The Sound of Music's Charmian Carr, who played the eldest daughter Liesl, embraced this and titled her autobiography Forever Liesl.
• Despite both having extensive theatrical careers, the late Bruno Ganz and Thomas Kretschmann are better remembered by audiences as Adolf Hitler and Hermann Fegelein in Downfall (2004) respectively.
• Betsy Palmer actually had quite a lengthy career on the stage, and as a panelist on the game show I've Got a Secret, so it came as quite a surprise when she got Spocked for Friday the 13th (1980). She had viewed the script as "a piece of shit" that she only did because it paid for a new car she needed, and was not expecting it to be such a smash success. Baffled by the association with Mrs Voorhees at first, she came to embrace the fame surrounding the franchise that came to define her career.
• After starring in the movie The Outlaws, Yoon Kye-sang went through this with his character Jang Chen. He said in an interview that when he was in The Kidnapping Day, people saw him in that series as a "funny Jang Chen". He even jokingly confessed he was considering changing his name to Jang Chen. He doesn't seem to be too upset about it, though, as he said in the same interview that he felt recognized.

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