Playing with Character Type

"[Audrey] Tautou has made several movies, but in America she is known for only one, Amélie, in which she played a wide-eyed innocent. Here she is just as wide-eyed, but if she's innocent it's only by reason of insanity. He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not has its own charms, but part of its wicked kick is that it's the anti-Amélie, presenting romantic fixation, not as noble and sweet, but objectively, as something selfish and volatile..."

— Mick LaSalle on Audrey Tautou's role in He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not

So we have Typecasting, which is cases in which an actor is known only for playing certain kinds of roles (in its most extreme form, I Am Not Spock, when the actor is only known for a particular role). Then we have Playing Against Type, which is when an actor deliberately plays a role extremely different from his or her established type.

Then there's this trope, a sub-trope of Playing Against Type, in which an actor plays against type in such a way as to specifically play with, subvert or outright deconstruct his or her previously established character type.

Supposing, for example, Bob is best known for playing charming, funny Nice Guys. In this trope, Bob takes on a role superficially quite similar to his established character type — only for the film to reveal that Bob's character is only capable of being charming and funny while drunk, and that he is driven to alcoholism by his history of social awkwardness and depression. (This trope can hence overlap with Deconstructed Character Archetype if Bob's character type is a recognizable archetype in its own right.)

Note that this trope is not limited to comedic character types being Played for Drama; it's entirely possible to do this by playing dramatic character types for laughs (e.g.: Bob is best-known for playing tough-as-nails gangsters, and then plays a wannabe gangster who acts tough but is in fact easily frightened and can barely hold a gun, let alone fire one), or exploring facets of a dramatic or comedic character type previously left unexamined.

When successfully executed, this trope can cast an actor's earlier roles in an entirely new light and lead members of the audience to cry, "He Really Can Act!" When done poorly, it can seem jarring and awkward and may lead the audience to finding it "Questionable Casting" (especially if the actor in question is insufficiently skilled to pull it off).

Compare I Am Not Spock, I Am Not Leonard Nimoy, Adam Westing, Self-Parody, Meta Casting, Casting Gag, Tom Hanks Syndrome and Leslie Nielsen Syndrome. In-universe, compare with Hidden Depths, Character Development, Flat Character and Rounded Character.

Note: Do not list a different actor indented under another actor's example just because they appeared in the same work. Indented examples should only be examples of when the same actor played with their character type in multiple different roles. See Example Indentation in Trope Lists for more information.

Unmarked spoilers below.

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Examples:

Live-Action Actors

Film

• Robin Williams is best known for playing cheery, funny, and manically upbeat characters, but in One Hour Photo he plays a character whose outward cheerfulness masks the fact that he is a Stepford Smiler Stalker with a Crush.
• Jim Carrey:
  • He subverted his reputation for upbeat, funny, over-the-top characters in Black Comedy The Cable Guy, playing a character whose demented zaniness is indicative of his Stalker with a Crush tendencies.
  • Likewise in The Truman Show, in which his character's superficial friendliness and wacky charm hides his inner loneliness and yearning to escape his dreary life.
• Audrey Tautou, as per the page quote, is best known (especially in the English-speaking world) for her role in Amélie, in which she plays a sweet, innocent, hopelessly romantic young woman (essentially a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, except that she's the protagonist). For the first half of He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not, she appears to be playing a similar type of character, only for the film to reveal that she is in fact a violent, insane Yandere, whose innocent romantic spirit is symptomatic of her complete and utter detachment from reality.
• Sadie Sink plays around with her usual typecasting as Troubled, but Cute teens in The Whale. While in Stranger Things and Fear Street, her Jerk with a Heart of Gold personas emphasise the latter, Ellie is considerably less sympathetic. While she does have a Freudian Excuse and seems to improve by the end, part of the sadness comes from Charlie trying to believe his daughter is a better person than she actually is.
• As part of Unforgiven's Genre Deconstruction of Westerns as a whole, Clint Eastwood's role in the film is a deconstruction of his earlier Western character(s), namely those from the Dollars Trilogy.
• In what has actually become a sort of type casting itself, Morgan Freeman, who is known for playing "wise old man" characters, sometimes plays "wise old man characters... who turn out to be evil", with Wanted being a good example of this.
• Adam Sandler has played with his stereotypical persona more than once:
  • In Punch-Drunk Love, his character is, like always, antisocial, emotionally immature, and prone to uncontrollable fits of anger. Instead of that being a source of comedy, it leads to awkward, embarrassing situations, and the character leads a lonely, depressing life. Roger Ebert discussed this in his review of the film.
  • His character in Click is a workaholic with very little time to spend with his family, but as the film goes on the audience learns that this attitude makes him miss out on most of his life, leaving him a broken man.
  • He also plays a broken character in Reign Over Me where the character's seemingly carefree attitude is actually just an escape mechanism so he doesn't have to acknowledge a terrible trauma in his life. Any attempts to disturb his escape from reality tactics are usually met with violent denial and outbursts.
  • Howard Ratner in Uncut Gems is impulsive, hotheaded, selfish, irresponsible, and immature, much like many of Sandler's comedy roles. Here, it's Played for Drama (and for Black Comedy).
• A One-Scene Wonder example in Natural Born Killers, with Rodney Dangerfield - replete with Laugh Track and his "I don't get no respect" shtick - playing Mallory's violent, sexually abusive father. Makes for very uncomfortable viewing indeed.
• Robert De Niro has made a career for the past ten or more years out of subverting, parodying, or deconstructing the tough-guy cred he had accumulated over a long and illustrious career. Examples include Analyze This and Stardust.
• Leslie Nielsen's goofy role in Airplane! was a play on his previous roles of the studly, stoic hero. One critic quipped that what was needed of him in his dramatic roles and his comedic roles was exactly the same: the ability to recite patently absurd dialogue while keeping a perfectly straight face. This was so successful that he's now better-known as a comedic actor than a dramatic one.
• Barbara Billingsley's most well-known role during her heyday was June Cleaver, the housewife in the archetypical '50s Slice of Life Dom Com Leave It to Beaver. It makes having her play the Jive Turkey translator in Airplane! that much more stark (and hilarious).
• Anthony Perkins in Psycho. Thitherto this, Perkins had been known for playing likeable, affable, somewhat socially awkward supporting roles. When adapting the film from Robert Bloch's book of the same name, Alfred Hitchcock was unimpressed with the original characterization of Norman Bates, a grouchy, overweight alcoholic with much more overt problems with women and sex (directly based upon the inspiration for Bates, Ed Gein). He instead decided to change the characterization to superficially match Perkins's earlier roles, largely because Perkins looked, in Hitchcock's own words, "like a boy scout". This made Bates's character more sympathetic, the Decoy Protagonist element easier to swallow and the Twist Ending much more shocking. Alas, this gambit was so successful that Perkins ended up being typecast as Bates for the rest of his career.
• John Travolta has a natural screen presence that can be described as a complete embodiment of the Nice Guy in TV shows and movies like Welcome Back, Kotter, Phenomenon, and Look Who's Talking. On the other hand, he seems to LOVE subverting that niceness by playing Affably Evil or Faux Affably Evil characters in movies like Broken Arrow and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. His role in the movie Face/Off zigzags this trope, where he starts out as a Nice Guy FBI agent who has to swap faces with evil terrorist Nicolas Cage. This allowed Travolta (and Cage) to play both sides of their personas in the same movie. Also played with in From Paris with Love, wherein he plays a ruthless Good is Not Nice CIA agent.
• The protagonist of The Perfect Host is a bank robber who is looking for a place to hide. So he manages to trick his way into the house of a guy played by David Hyde Pierce who seems to be the latter's usual milquetoast character a la Niles Crane. Then Pierce's character reveals himself to be an Ax-Crazy maniac who proceeds to drug the protagonist and torment him for most of the night.
• David Bowie started getting film offers almost as soon as he had his commercial breakthrough via his Alter-Ego Acting persona of Ziggy Stardust, a flamboyant alien (or Touched by Vorlons) rock musician, Messianic Archetype, and Tragic Hero who succumbs to Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll, ego, and his own fans. But virtually all of the roles he was offered were Ziggy Expies. Instead, his first major film role was that of Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Newton is also an alien Messianic Archetype Tragic Hero...but he's The Stoic and Moe before Moe was trendy, and his succumbing to Earthlings and their vices is the result of humanity proving infectious rather than success going to his head. Also, he can't sing.
• In The Descendants, one of the main plot points is that the protagonist (played by George Clooney) has found out that his comatose and slowly dying wife has been cheating on him. Early on he and his daughter find a picture of the guy...and he's played by Matthew Lillard, to which he and his daughters react with "Seriously? THAT'S the guy?". While this could simply be a crack at his appearance (who would go from Clooney to Lillard?), audiences familiar with Lillard's typical "annoying jackass" roles will likely start figuring this is yet another one of those...then once they actually meet Lillard's character, you're blown away.
• Mark Sheppard is very well known for playing slightly sinister, slimy sons-of... whom you can't help but admire even as they're stabbing your protagonists in the back. Then he appeared as one of the Regents on Warehouse 13. When an episode was centered around Pete getting assigned by Mrs. Frederic to find out which Regent was The Mole, I Knew It! was the immediate reaction when Sheppard's character quickly turned out to be an evil bastard making some kind of play for control of the warehouse. Then it turned out that Pete hallucinated the entire thing, and in a later episode Sheppard's character would even make a Heroic Sacrifice to save the main characters.
• Gary Oldman is well-known for playing villains, so when he was cast in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban as Sirius Black, a mass-murderer after Harry, no one was surprised. By the end, it's revealed that Sirius never murdered or betrayed anyone, and in later movies, he becomes the closest thing Harry has to family (naturally, this came as no surprise to viewers who'd already read the books).
• A retroactive example: Kate Winslet spends most of A Kid in King Arthur's Court as Proper Lady Princess Sarah. Then comes the twist: Princess Sarah is an Action Girl, who has been secretly dressing as the Black Knight.
• James McAvoy in Victor Frankenstein. The actor was almost always Typecast as a Wide-Eyed Idealist, he often appeared in Period Pieces, and he had about a dozen roles where he portrayed an intellectual character. Between 2013 and 2015, however, he was Playing Against Type as all of his onscreen and theatre personas suffered from mental illness. McAvoy's interpretation of Mad Scientist Victor Frankenstein combines all of these elements; Victor is a dark character, but even he possesses a hint of naïveté when he says things like, "I dream of a world where hope replaces fear." That line of dialogue could have been spoken by the benevolent Dr. Charles Xavier (which is McAvoy's most famous example of Typecasting), but in Victor's case, his idealism is mixed with Sanity Slippage, and they twist him into a Well-Intentioned Extremist.
• Barbara Hershey as My Beloved Smother and Mama Bear at the same time, notably in Black Swan and Once Upon a Time. It's a similar situation in Insidious...except she's unambiguously the hero this time.
• The producers of Flightplan cast Sean Bean as the pilot to mislead the audience, who'd think he's part of the villainous plot because of his typecasting as a bad guy.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Cobie Smulders plays Maria Hill as what Robin Scherbatsky (from How I Met Your Mother) would be like if she worked for a government intelligence agency.
  • Robert Redford's role as Alexander Pierce in Captain America: The Winter Soldier riffs off his earlier roles as liberal or left-wing heroes taking down fascist conspiracies, but then reveals that he's the leader of the film's fascist conspiracy.
  • Ben Mendelsohn is known for his villainous roles, which led to him being cast as Talos, the Big Bad of Captain Marvel (2019). Namely, to help obscure the fact that the Skrulls undergo Adaptational Heroism in the film and Talos is an Anti-Hero at worst, only trying to find his family and protect his people from the Kree.
• End of Days was sold on the premise of "Arnold Schwarzenegger fights The Devil". However, instead of depicting Arnold as an unstoppable force of nature that can destroy everything in sight, this movie depicts his character, Jericho, as being genuinely flawed, such as being suicidal, not being able to do the same death-defying acts as the other heroes Arnold has played (not counting the scene where he uses a rope on a helicopter to lower himself mid-flight) and, in the end, there was no other way to stop Satan from causing the End unless Jericho killed himself, but at least Jericho can be with his family again. In interviews, Schwarzenegger said that he took this role because he thought it was the perfect script to make his return to action movies, which makes this part even more weird.
• Jason Statham is well-known for his roles as steely-eyed, razor-sharp badasses. In Spy, he plays Rick Ford, a steely-eyed, razor-sharp Cloudcuckoolander suffering from Small Name, Big Ego. When he's not recounting ludicrous, probably-made-up tales of his previous exploits ("I drove a car off a freeway on top of a train while on fire. Not the car; I was on fire."), his action-hero attitude is constantly screwing up attempts to be a stealthy spy.
• Before undergoing Tom Hanks Syndrome, Anne Hathaway played a lot of wholesome squeaky-clean girls in various Disney films. In Alice in Wonderland (2010) she plays the White Queen as a sort of darker take on her earlier innocent characters. The Queen is in the Uncanny Valley and is strongly implied to be a Stepford Smiler. Word of God says that she surrounds herself with so much light imagery because she's too tempted by the dark side.
• Keira Knightley eventually became typecast as a Plucky Girl ahead of her time in various period pieces. In The Duchess she starts off as this type...and then runs into the sexist and oppressive laws of the time. She invoked this in Atonement too, as Joe Wright had wanted her to play the adult Briony. Having had enough of "coming of age ladies", Keira chose to play Cecilia instead.
• Tom Cruise is one of the quintessential confident, competent, and easy on the eyes action heroes. In Edge of Tomorrow, he plays US Army Major William Cage, and we are introduced to him giving interviews looking like every bit like an experienced war hero...and then the minute he's ordered to go into a war zone, we learn that he's a glorified PR drone who has never been in combat a day in his life and proceeds to do everything he can in order to avoid fighting, such as grovelling, blackmail, and outright desertion. After being dragged kicking and screaming into battle and dying fairly quickly, a twist of fate gives him the power to trigger a time loop after death. We then see him spend the rest of the movie (and LOTS of death triggered loops) slowly becoming the Tom Cruise hero we all know and love.
• Naomi Watts often plays heroic Woobies that endure plenty of suffering. In the Divergent films she's a Jerkass Woobie who's causing the suffering.
• American Hustle features Amy Adams playing a sort of Innocence Lost character, and there are a few scenes that evoke her more familiar sweetheart personas in other films. But her character Sydney has had to reinvent herself as a sexually aggressive Femme Fatale - though she wants to escape that life and settle down.
• Deborah Kerr was Hollywood's favourite Proper Lady in the 1950s and her most famous role is arguably Mrs Anna in The King and I. In The Innocents she plays around with that benevolent governess image. She believes her two children are being possessed by ghosts, but it's left entirely open whether she's just imagining that as a result of her sexual repression.
• Channing Tatum entered The New '10s playing his Dumb Muscle image for laughs. Then came Foxcatcher, where this is Played for Drama and his character feels inadequate compared to his more beloved older brother. In a different vein, it's something of a Running Gag for Channing to have lots of Ho Yay with his male co-stars. This film implies something of a twisted sexual relationship between Mark Schultz and John Du Pont.
• Star Wars:
  • Frank Oz usually played goofy, silly-looking creatures like Fozzie Bear and Miss Piggy. In The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda presents himself as a goofy, silly-looking character, but is revealed to be actually very wise and powerful beneath his facade. By the prequels, Yoda's veneer of goofiness is almost gone (though still there when teaching Jedi Younglings) and it reaches Playing Against Type by Revenge of the Sith as it's the Darkest Hour for Yoda himself.
  • In Rogue One, Mads Mikkelsen - who is primarily typecast as villains in American films and television - plays a scientist working for THE Trope Codifier, if not the Trope Namer, of the Evil Empire. The catch? In this film, he's actually a reluctant Mad Scientist (pardon the pun) who helps the heroes in this movie destroy the Death Star.
• Several examples in Jojo Rabbit. It is, after all, a Black Comedy set in Nazi Germany.
  • Taika Waititi initially retains his trademark quirkiness as Jojo's imaginary friend, but with that friend being Adolf Hitler, his performance also has hints of genuine menace that become more blatant as the film goes on.
  • Stephen Merchant is nearly always a cheerful, lovable fellow in films he appears in. Here, he plays an Affably Evil Gestapo officer who doesn't outwardly seem much different from his usual characters, save for the whole antisemitic genocide thing.
  • Sam Rockwell frequently plays racist hicks, cowardly bad guys, and assorted scumbags. In a cast that consists almost entirely of Nazis, Rockwell's character is the one adult member who displays any trace of morals and intelligence, who ends up sacrificing his life for Jojo. Still a Nazi and not a good person, by his own admission.
  • Rebel Wilson is usually typecast as outrageous Fat Comic Relief characters. She plays Fraulein Rahm — still comic relief, yet also a fanatically devoted Nazi who brainwashes children into Fascism and throws them into the meat grinder as Child Soldiers.
• Liam Neeson tends to carry himself with a quiet charisma and nobility that sees him play largely heroic characters, even if they sometimes fit into the Jerk with a Heart of Gold trope like in Schindler's List. Even his more brutal and scary characters like in Taken or A Walk Among the Tombstones have gentle, caring aspects to them, and he's even put that warm, pleasant voice to use playing Aslan. In Widows, his character seems set up to be his usual type: morally ambiguous, but still a charming, caring man who's doubtlessly A Father to His Men. He reveals himself to be a greedy, craven coward concerned largely with himself, and who murders his entire heist crew in a horrific way, ultimately trying to kill his own grieving wife.
• Nick Frost in Slaughterhouse Rulez. As usual, he plays an eccentric Cloudcuckoolander - here, however, his Cloudcuckoolander tendencies come off as more him being unstable than him merely being a goofball.
• Chuck Norris is one of the archetypal Hollywood Action Heroes who can memetically beat up people with a mere glare. Hero and the Terror, while seemingly another "Chuck smashes Evildoers" plot in fact deconstructs this hero myth. Norris plays a cynical, jaded police officer who regrets his past as a Cowboy Cop because his recklessness almost got him killed when he tried to take down a sinister Serial Killer twice his size by going in guns blazing and walking right into a trap. Anyone familiar with Norris' usual roles would be shocked to see his character struggling with PTSD.
• Pedro Pascal has played several characters who start out as friends to protagonists, but turn out to be Evil All Along, and the last enemies the protagonists fight. In The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, he plays Nicolas Cage's newest friend/screenwriting partner, whom the CIA suspects of being a crime lord. However, he turns out to just be a nerd taking the heat for his cousin's crimes, and actually saves Nick's life.
• Alexander Abdulov was famous for playing Knight in Shining Armor romantic leads such as Ivan from Sorcerers. Then he got cast as Anthony Marston in the 1987 adaptation of And Then There Were None: handsome, daring and attracted to the main heroine, but revealed to be utterly amoral and killed off halfway through the movie's first part, barely contributing anything to the plot.
• The title character of The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is a talented and eccentric gentleman, which his actor Benedict Cumberbatch often plays, but Wain is affable and bumbling rather than insufferable like many of the other characters in said wheelhouse.
• The upper-class white liberal villains of Get Out (2017) are played by actors famous for not just playing more heroic versions of that exact character type, but also for being outspoken liberals in real life. Bradley Whitford, who played the father Dean, is best known for playing Josh Lyman on The West Wing, a show that's often stereotypically associated with that political outlook. Catherine Keener, who played the mother Missy, is also known for playing these sorts of middle-class suburbanite roles. Finally, Allison Williams, who played the daughter Rose, was best known at the time for playing the artsy, narcissistic hipster Marnie Michaels on Girls, and for being the daughter of NBC newscaster Brian Williams.
• All of the "nice guys" in Promising Young Woman are played by actors well known for playing charming romantic leads (Adam Brody, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Christopher Lowell). Director Emerald Fennell wanted to show that not all men who commit sexual assault look like mean hulking brutes, while also suggesting that even rapists see themselves as charming romantic leads.

Live-Action TV

• My Name Is Earl: In the episode "Made a Lady Think I Was God", Roseanne Barr guest stars as a character with her usual insulting personality until Earl inadvertently turns her into a kindly nun.
• In an episode of Bones, Robert Englund (of A Nightmare on Elm Street fame) guest-stars as a creepy janitor who hangs out in the basement of the school - who, in a subversion of Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize, isn't the perp.
• Before Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston was best known for his performance as Hal in sitcom Malcolm in the Middle, an archetypal Bumbling Dad and Henpecked Husband frustrated by his dead-end job and poor financial standing. His character in the series, Walter White, starts off as a very similar sort of character, which makes his transformation into a vicious, ruthless drug dealer all the more shocking.
• For those who watched Friday Night Lights before Breaking Bad, it at first seemed that Jesse Plemons as Todd was playing a criminal version of Landry: an extreme Nice Guy and even a little dorky. Then he unexpectedly murders a child with no hesitation and only gets more creepy as the show progresses.
• In Summer Glau's first guest appearance as Skylar in Alphas, she is initially depicted as the kind of bizarre, waif-like young woman who she became famous for as River in Firefly and Cameron in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. It then comes as more of a surprise when it's revealed that the MacGuffin that she's searching for is actually her daughter, as nobody would expect her usual type of character to have a child.
• Alan Tudyk is introduced in Dollhouse as a very similar character to the one he became famous for in Joss Whedon's earlier Firefly as Wash, and appears to be a harmless dolt. Then it turns out he's actually the rogue active "Alpha", a Serial Killer with a sci-fi version of multiple personality disorder. Later on he started playing similar Bitch in Sheep's Clothing characters until that became a typecasting in itself, and was subverted the other way around in Frozen (2013) where he's set up to be the Big Bad, but isn't.
• Robert Carlyle is often the Butt-Monkey of the story in some way. In Once Upon a Time his character (Rumpelstiltskin) started out as one. His status as this is Played for Drama and motivated him to become The Chessmaster Big Bad known as the Dark One.
• Another Once Upon a Time cast member who took this trope for a friendly game of pinball was Raphael Sbarge. In live-action roles (Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Cold Case, Star Trek: Voyager), he's usually playing some deeply disturbed Perp of the Week. It's his voice acting roles where he tends to play Nice Guys like Scorch (Star Wars: Republic Commando), Carth Onasi (Knights of the Old Republic), Kaiden Alenko (Mass Effect), and the title character of Deadman. Jiminy Cricket would be playing to type when depicted as a CGI cricket, but playing against it as the meek Archie Hopper.
• Andre Braugher plays Captain Holt in Brooklyn Nine-Nine like he's still on Homicide: Life on the Street, with much of the character's humor coming from his overly stoic demeanor contrasting with the wackiness of what goes on in the precinct.
• In season 4 of Veronica Mars, Patton Oswalt plays another "Plucky Comic Relief nerd" who repeatedly impedes in the investigation carried out by the main characters with his bumbling antics, is constantly trading insults with the Sitcom Archnemesis in his online group of amateur sleuths, and it's even somewhat sweet when he starts to romance one of his female friends. Until it's revealed that he's really a delusional Psychopathic Manchild who treats everything as a game, murders the Sitcom Archnemesis to frame him, and becomes a copycat Mad Bomber to undo his perceived lack of respect from the "alpha crowd" around him.
• Jaleel White is famous for his role on Family Matters as a nerd who is constantly pursuing a girl who is not interested in him. Because he is so dorky, he comes across as annoying but generally harmless. In an episode of CSI he plays a character who was constantly hitting on the victim before she was murdered despite her lack of interest. This time he is not a nerd and comes across as creepy and even a reason to suspect he killed her. Though he didn't.
• In The Outer Limits (1995) episode "Zig Zag", Frank Whaley seems to be playing the usual timid character he became famous for in The '90s due to his youthful "whitebread" looks. However, in this episode, it's just a fake persona for a bold cyberterrorist who is using it to mask his real status as The Chessmaster.
• Comedians Lily Tomlin and Chris Rock guest-starred in separate episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. Their characters fit their comic personas, but were both brutal murderers, making their quirks much more disturbing.
• Wentworth Miller became synonymous with Chronic Hero Syndrome after his exposure on Prison Break as Nice Guy Michael Scofield. In an episode of House, he plays a wealthy Good Samaritan who is so altruistic that he'd happily sign away all his assets to anybody if they asked him for help but is only doing so because of a brain disease that is affecting his judgement. His wife is rightfully freaked out that he doesn't prioritize either himself or their family over the well-being of random strangers, as her husband actively wishes that he will die of his ailment so his organs can be used to save a few more lives.
• Paul Rudd is well known for near exclusively playing affable nice guys. In The Shrink Next Door he plays Isaac "Ike" Herschkopf, a Psycho Psychologist whose affable and kind demeanor is a mask hiding an emotionally abusive Manipulative Bastard. A mask that every so often comes off with disturbing results.
• The Last of Us (2023) stars Pedro Pascal as anti-heroic Joel Miller, in his third instance of portraying a morally-grey single father on HBO. Previously, he made his big break playing Game of Thrones anti-hero Oberyn Martell, then depicted Wonder Woman 1984 anti-villain Maxwell Lord. Unlike Oberyn and Maxwell, Joel outlives his own daughter in the series premiere (Pascal's children in GoT and WW84 either outlive him or have no death scene at all), then spends the rest of the season protecting a surrogate daughter instead.
• Also on The Last of Us, Nick Offerman as Bill starts out basically playing Ron Swanson after the collapse of civilization whose only focus is on basic survival. Meeting and falling in love with Frank turns him into the lead of tender love story and ends up making Bill a much better and more idealistic person by the end.

Music

• In the Joyner Lucas song "What If I Was Gay?", Joyner plays a gay man who comes out to his homophobic friend who tries to force him back into the closet. The homophobic friend is played by Eminem, notorious for his homophobic lyrics... and who admits at the end of the song that he's gay, too.

Voice Actors

Anime

• The voice actress Rie Kugimiya almost always voices heroic characters (typically those with a tsundere personality), which allowed for an effective Bait the Dog with Nena Trinity in Mobile Suit Gundam 00. Nena initially comes off as a standard cute and quirky character and then sort of out of nowhere, she decides to use her mech slaughter a wedding party because they were having a good time and she wasn't. Then her actual character is established. Asura's Wrath is a much straighter example, as her characters (Mithra and the villager who looks like her) are almost complete opposites to her established typecasting.
• The casting of Doraemon's voice actress as Monokuma in Danganronpa is a perfect example. Monokuma is a parody of a Japanese kawaii mascot character with a Non-Standard Character Design, who speaks with affected cuteness, as well as openly being a vicious, psychotic Evil Genius manipulating people into killing each other, explicitly for his own amusement. Him choosing to use a voice associated so strongly with the wonder of childhood in generations of the Japanese consciousness^note The go-to analogy for international audiences is "imagine Jigsaw from Saw voiced by Mickey Mouse" perfectly fits his personality.

Video Games

• Nolan North:
  • His role in Spec Ops: The Line as Cpt. Martin Walker initially appears to be quite similar to North's usual type (specifically the "Drake" voice from Uncharted), but as the game wears on it turns into a savage deconstruction of the character type, with Walker becoming increasingly violent and unhinged as a consequence of the horrific actions he is forced (or believes himself to have been forced) to carry out. Curiously, this was apparently unintentional on the part of the development team.
  • Then there was his role in The Last of Us as David, the leader of a group of survivors, who is kinda in a sense Nathan Drake if he was the leader of a group of survivors. But then you find out he's not only violently crazy, but he's also a cannibal and possibly a pedophile.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic: A light-sided male Consular? Playing with type because the Consular is a Martial Pacifist diplomat. Dark sided male Consular? A cruel, nasty Knight Templar manipulating the galaxy to his own benefit while keeping up the appearance of a hero.
• Also in Spec Ops and in the same vein, Bruce Boxleitner as Col. Konrad is an inversion of his roles as The Captain following Babylon 5, a good leader that had become a military despot, a Colonel Kilgore with a nice voice and good use of words. And then we find out that Walker has charged into the situation without being given all the information and things are not what they seem... like the fact most of the rantings Walker (and the player) has heard throughout the game are Walker's own hallucinations.
• Matthew Mercer is known for voicing sarcastic badasses. Alvin from Tales of Xillia is one of these, but he ends up betraying the party multiple times and undergoes Sanity Slippage.
• Bryce Papenbrook is often cast as Nice Guys who have an idealistic view of the world. He also provides the voices for Henry from Fire Emblem: Awakening and Nagito Komaeda from Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, who are both Nice Guys in a twisted and dark way.
• Stephanie Sheh, in her own words, is often cast as "super-shy high school girls or completely bipolar types". This is probably why she was cast as Mikan Tsumiki in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, since she's both.
• Metal Gear:
  • Metal Gear Solid:
    • Akio Ōtsuka, the Japanese voice of Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid, is jarring to hear if you're an English player more used to David Hayter's deep-voiced version of the character. Ohtsuka has often played cool, deep-voiced characters who crack the odd Bond One-Liner, but the voice he uses for Snake is more like the 'astringent', warm and likeable register he uses in his extensive career as a voice-over artist for television advertising, giving Snake an impression of Dissonant Serenity that at first makes him seem like the most relatable, fun character in the cast, but gets progressively more desperate and brittle as the story continues and it becomes more apparent how messed-up a person he is.
    • Hideyuki Tanaka had previously been playing the badass, cynical Jonathan Ingram, a character who shares more than a few traits with Solid Snake, in Hideo Kojima's previous game, Policenauts. In Metal Gear Solid, he is cast as Otacon, an awkward Otaku with a poster of Jonathan on his wall, with the voice indicating that there is a core of coolness in there. As Otacon becomes more confident and attractive over the course of the series, Tanaka's performance gets closer to his voice as Jonathan.
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty:
    • Quinton Flynn's Raiden was developed to sound like an older version of the title character from Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures, who's also a young, blond, heroic character in a James Bond-influenced action-adventure setting with supernatural elements (in the case of the incarnation of Jonny played by Flynn, even incorporating the idea of VR training as a significant part of the backstory). This adds some interest to the reveal that Raiden isn't a Kid Hero, but a former Enfant Terrible traumatised by fighting in wars while still a child.
    • Kenyuu Horiuchi was cast as Raiden because of his ability to play cool Pretty Boy while himself being a much older veteran, with the idea that Raiden's voice would sound inappropriately old for his age, indicating he isn't as innocent as he seems.
  • The Japanese version of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker probably contains Metal Gear's best example, Stunt Casting Paz Ortega Andrade with the Jpop idol Nana Mizuki. Paz appears to be a perfect innocent, but we later find out she's significantly older than she appears, has a rude, foul-mouthed, and obnoxious personality, loves nuclear war, hates everyone around her, and also smokes, and sprays you with verbal abuse while attacking you, with a jpop song playing in the background about how nuclear deterrence is a lot like love. This is a reference to the pressure to maintain impossible standards of Contractual Purity for Japanese idols, who have had their careers ended by slips of an Incorruptible Pure Pureness image that no-one could maintain. (Although it's fair to suggest that Mizuki has probably never tried killing people in a giant, nuclear-equipped mech.)
• In Disco Elysium, the Chapo Trap House hosts play with their on-air comic personas without their characters really being their type:
  • Felix Beiderman plays Sociopathic Soldier Kortenaer, who reflects his interest in oafish, delusional military culture. Unlike Felix's usual version of this character, Korty is Played for Drama. He gets no funny lines, doesn't do any of Felix's familiar schtick, and in fact gets some dialogue describing a war crime he did that is so unpleasant and graphic that the game - which is already dark and gross - makes a point of warning you that you can opt out of hearing it. If you pick up on the slight humour of Korty's horrific violence being a reaction to his own ineffectuality, it's probably only because he's played by the guy who coined the term 'failson'.
  • Matt Christman, known on the show for his Sophisticated as Hell rants about infuriating political cruelties, plays Titus, a militant Unionist who is also far left, has a hot temper and is known for raising his voice... but in Titus's case, it's only to exercise his authority. Titus isn't interested in rhetoric and is suspicious of conventional learning, and when it comes to dealing with the political situation's stupidity he is extremely calculating and level-headed.
  • Will as Fuck The World, a young man who styles himself as a delinquent but who is actually a literary critic, is more along the lines of self-parody of the Chapo hosts' 'dirtbag' image.
  • Virgil, voted the handsomest one on the show by an audience of mostly men, plays a swishy Camp Gay who Harry finds extremely cool and mysterious. On the show more fun is poked at Virgil's foppish geekiness and ambiguous disorder than him being especially camp or cool.
• Elijah Wood is usually cast as an innocent, "soft" character, most notably Frodo Baggins. In Psychonauts 2, Nick Johnsmith is initally portrayed as the same- a friendly office worker who is said to get along with everybody. After Nick drops his mask, he turns out to be The Mole and a Psychopathic Manchild who thinks he can successfully control a mass-murdering psychic.

Western Animation

• Ariel Winter is known for voicing Nice Girl characters like Marina and Sofia. In Mr. Peabody & Sherman, she voices Penny Peterson, who is very mean and condescending, but she gradually becomes a better person and shows that she cares for Sherman.
• Bill Fagerbakke, best known for voicing ditzy Manchild Patrick Star on Spongebob Squarepants, voiced Broadway on Gargoyles, who acted in a similar manner to Patrick, but was actually fairly intelligent, mature, and romantic underneath his goofball exterior.
• The Ancient Sleeping Magi of Life Giving from Adventure Time is one of Dana Snyder's usual hammy Cloudcuckoolander, except with his mental problems played for tragedy rather than for laughs.
• Grey Griffin as Major Doctor Ghastly from Evil Con Carne shows her as a Mad Scientist who actually cares about other people compared to her other villainous roles, as in The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, The Fairly Oddparents, and Avatar: The Last Airbender. Her role as Karen Crawford^note who, while corrupt and negligent, is still quite pleasant and emotionally balanced compared to her aforementioned villainous roles in the adult-oriented Paradise PD also qualifies.
• A dub example: In the Japanese dub of The Amazing World of Gumball, the titular character is played by Junko Takeuchi. He would fit her Typecasting of goofy young boys (as in Naruto, Hunter × Hunter, Monster, and Inazuma Eleven)... if only Gumball didn't take a level in jerkass and become The Cynic in the second season.
• Joseph Sugarman in Bojack Horseman is just like any other character played by Matthew Broderick: friendly and charismatic... which makes his more horrific actions such as getting his wife lobotomized, then threatening to do the same to his daughter if she couldn't keep her emotions in check that much creepier, especially since as far as society was concerned at the time, he was justified to do so.
• Mark Hamill plays the superhero Spectre in Batman: The Brave and the Bold, a sharp contrast to his usual typecast as the villain, most famously the Joker. However, unlike Mark's most famous role as Luke Skywalker, the Spectre is an Anti-Hero who advocates vengeance and killing villains. And this naturally puts Hamill's Spectre at odds with Kevin Conroy's Phantom Stranger over Batman's path as a hero, refitting their Joker and Batman relationship from Batman: The Animated Series in a new dynamic.
• Nick Frost in Ice Age: Continental Drift. He voices a Cloudcuckoolander Ditz... who is The Brute of the villains and who cheerfully admits to being one of the "bad guys".
• Patrick Stewart as Seti from The Prince of Egypt is a Reasonable Authority Figure who loves his sons... and had thousands of innocent children murdered without remorse. "They were only slaves."
• Sarah Silverman often plays foul-mouthed, sarcastic jerks. It looked like her character Vanellope von Schweetz in Wreck-It Ralph was just a more kid-friendly version of that. Of course it wasn't nearly that simple.
• Tania Gunadi is typically known for playing free-spirited, young characters who fit Genki Girl archetype as well as those who are a Jerk with a Heart of Gold. On Sofia the First, she voices Miss Elodie, who's also a free-spirited Genki Girl but is an adult.
• Tom Kenny as the Ice King in Adventure Time. At first, it's one of his many Cloudcuckoolanders (who's also a Harmless Villain). Although once his backstory as Simon Petrikov is established, it fits his less-common more serious roles he doesn't play as often.

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