Actors And Roles You Can't Separate Them From

Xprimentyl

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Watching TV and saw yet another Allstate Insurance commercial featuring Dean Winters as "Mayhem," and I told my girlfriend that I can never un-see him as Ryan O'Riley from HBO's prison drama Oz. She's never seen it. I ran through the litany of famous actors in that series that are forever embedded in my head as those characters. The series is so raw in so many ways, their characters became the actors for me. It's been almost 20 years since Oz ended, and to this day J.K. Simmons is Schillinger; Harold Perrineau is Augustus Hill; Christopher Meloni is Chris Keller; Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje will forever be Simon Adebisi. It's so bad, it's to the point that any other characters they've portrayed have felt... disingenuous?

So, are there any actors that have played a role that forever defined them in your mind making seeing them as anyone else difficult to appreciate?
 
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gorfias

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Love Dean Winters. Associate him with the commercials and "Wayne" that started on Youtube Red and went to Amazon Prime. I don't, sadly, think there will be a Season 2. It is brilliant.

Andrew Robinson has been in plenty of stuff. But he'll always be the mad killer from Dirty Harry to me.

 
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Xprimentyl

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Love Dean Winters. Associate him with the commercials and "Wayne" that started on Youtube Red and went to Amazon Prime. I don't, sadly, think there will be a Season 2. It is brilliant.

Andrew Robinson has been in plenty of stuff. But he'll always be the mad killer from Dirty Harry to me.

We might have to try that out.
 
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Gordon_4

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I will probably have significant trouble separating Chris Evans from his role as Steven Rogers/Captain America. Like another Chris fifty years ago, Evans stepped onto screen in costume with just the right kind of musical backing track and became an icon in popular culture. I wish him well in all future dramatic endeavours……but goddamn if he just wasn’t born to play Cap.
 

Xprimentyl

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I will probably have significant trouble separating Chris Evans from his role as Steven Rogers/Captain America. Like another Chris fifty years ago, Evans stepped onto screen in costume with just the right kind of musical backing track and became an icon in popular culture. I wish him well in all future dramatic endeavours……but goddamn if he just wasn’t born to play Cap.
While I've not seen enough of Evans' Capt. America to feel the same, I agree Christopher Reeve is certainly forever Superman. I had to look up his filmography to see if he'd ever done anything BUT Superman. I'll save you the trip: he did.
 

Bob_McMillan

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In a bad way: Natalie Portman as Padme Amidala. Such a truly horrid performance, even though I know she's a better actor than that, I have a hard time seeing past it

In a good way: Pretty much the whole cast of Harry Potter. Seeing the cast grow (and growing alongside them) from awkward little kids to competent actors will forever cement them as the character they played. I have mostly outgrown the movies, but that they managed to get through 8 movies without the kids turning into horrible Hollywood monsters and losing any major cast members is a fucking miracle.
 

Gordon_4

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In a bad way: Natalie Portman as Padme Amidala. Such a truly horrid performance, even though I know she's a better actor than that, I have a hard time seeing past it

In a good way: Pretty much the whole cast of Harry Potter. Seeing the cast grow (and growing alongside them) from awkward little kids to competent actors will forever cement them as the character they played. I have mostly outgrown the movies, but that they managed to get through 8 movies without the kids turning into horrible Hollywood monsters and losing any major cast members is a fucking miracle.
The British acting scene is a little different to Hollywood. Deeply imperfect in its own ways I’m sure but British film lacks a lot of the glamour and glitz that makes Hollywood what it is.
 

BrawlMan

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  • Petrea Burchard will always be Ryoko.
  • Robin Williams will always be Batty or Genie to me.
  • Wesley Snipes will always be Blade.
  • Jim Carrey will always be Stanley Ipkiss or Ace Ventura.
 
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XsjadoBlayde

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Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast.

Wolverine is now owned by Hugh Jackman, I think almost everybody telepathically agreed on that universally, so that role's done, it's finished, pack it up and lock it down beneath the Earth forever more.

Everyone in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet. Yes, everyone!
 

Bedinsis

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The British acting scene is a little different to Hollywood. Deeply imperfect in its own ways I’m sure but British film lacks a lot of the glamour and glitz that makes Hollywood what it is.
I am reminded of this article:

written by former child star Mara Wilson. Something I noticed after reading it was that all the examples were Americans, and I thought that the Brit Christian Bale and the Harry Potter actors turned out fine, so I wondered if there is a difference in culture.

Oh and regarding the leading question: The Harry Potter leads.
 
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gorfias

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I will probably have significant trouble separating Chris Evans from his role as Steven Rogers/Captain America. Like another Chris fifty years ago, Evans stepped onto screen in costume with just the right kind of musical backing track and became an icon in popular culture. I wish him well in all future dramatic endeavours……but goddamn if he just wasn’t born to play Cap.
And to think he almost got type cast as Johnny Storm
 

thebobmaster

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Kevin Conroy is Batman. Period.
I am reminded of this article:

written by former child star Mara Wilson. Something I noticed after reading it was that all the examples were Americans, and I thought that the Brit Christian Bale and the Harry Potter actors turned out fine, so I wondered if there is a difference in culture.

Oh and regarding the leading question: The Harry Potter leads.
One other thing that definitely helped with the Harry Potter leads specifically is that Chris Columbus, when casting for the first movie, made sure to interview the parents as well as the children and struck off any kids whose parents came off as potential stage parents, due to his bad experiences working with Kit Culkin, Macaulay's father, on the Home Alone films.
 

Bob_McMillan

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Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime. The original, and I'd argue still the best. But with many, many worthy younger brothers.
I saw a compilation of all the ridiculously shit lines he had in the Bay movies. What a waste of his time.
 
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