against type 

Definition:

Inherit in the definition is the risk that the performance will meet the disapproval of critics and the public, and that it will also detract from the image that has made an actor popular. The reward is that it will establish an actor as bankable to play different types. 

The term is generally applied to leading men, ladies and supporting actors. Non-leading actors either play a range of types or are expected to be seen but not noticed, or if noticed, not remembered.

Good Against Evil & Vice Versa

There were exceptions. One was Warner Brothers’ makeover of its leading gangster type, James Cagney. In “G Men” (1935), Cagney portrays a high-principled lawyer turned FBI agent who brings down a murderous gangster. Warner Brothers cast him in the role to counteract mounting public criticism that the studio gangster genre glamorized criminals.

The decline of the gangster genre enabled another Warner Brothers gangster type, Humphrey Bogart, to become hero Rick Blaine in “Casablanca” (1942). However, going from one type to the other required Bogart to cross a bridge called “The Maltese Falcon” (1941). Although Bogart’s character Sam Spade is a good guy, this remains uncertain until the end when Spade explains to femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy: “Don't be too sure I'm as crooked as I'm supposed to be. That sort of reputation might be good business . . . bringing high-priced jobs and making it easier to deal with the enemy . . .” In sum, to be believable, Sam Spade needed to be played by a criminal type.

By contrast, Dick Powell’s portrayal of hardboiled private detective Phillip Marlowe in “Murder, My Sweet” (1944) was vintage against type. For more than a decade, first with Warner Brothers and then Paramount, Powell had starred in light romantic comedies and musicals. Wanting to escape typecasting, he pursued the role of murderer Walter Neff in “Double Indemnity” (1944) only to lose out to Fred McMurray, another screen nice guy. Powell was cast as Raymond Chandler’s shamus by RKO in exchange for Powell signing a multi-picture contract deal. Edward Dmytryk, who directed “Murder, My Sweet,” would later write: "The idea of the man who had sung ‘Tiptoe through the Tulips’ playing a tough private eye was beyond our imaginations." Powell was so associated with romantic musical comedies that Chandler’s title, Farewell, My Lovely, was changed to “Murder, My Sweet.”

Perhaps more surprising to audiences was Gene Tierney’s conversion from Laura Hunt in “Laura” (1944) to Ellen Berent in “Leave Her to Heaven” (1945). Both films are regarded film noir, a genre that was the rage in Hollywood beginning in the 1940s and gateway to actors playing against type, e.g., “The Maltese Falcon” (1940), “Double Indemnity” (1944), “Murder, My Sweet” (1944). Key to film noir plots is the protagonist finally answering the question of whether the femme fatale is good or evil. Although it is not established until the end, one cannot believe watching “Laura” that Laura is guilty of anything other than causing men to put her on a pedestal. 20th Century Fox, however, apparently thought her femme fatale would translate well to “Leave Her to Heaven” even though evil. In fact, Tierney’s role as a psychopath is such a disconnect from her role in “Laura” that any plot similarities between the two films are lost. Indeed, Tierney’s role is more akin to that of the strangler played by Joseph Cotton in the psychological thriller “Shadow of a Doubt” (1943). “Leave Her to Heaven” was a box office success, although one wonders how much of that can be attributed to returning World War II GI’s wanting to see one of Hollywood’s most gorgeous women appear on screen for the first time in color.

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Stigma of Typecasting

In 1948, a U.S. Supreme Court antitrust decision divested studios of their theaters and made it increasingly difficult to afford exclusive stables of actors. Stars became independent contractors who were represented by talent agencies to negotiate picture deals with studios. Despite their independence, stars such as Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Rita Heyworth and Clark Gable continued to maintain their personas. Others such as Lana Turner sought to extend their chops. “I finally got tired of making movies where all I did was walk across the screen and look pretty,” Turner said. “I got a big chance to do some real acting . . . and I'm not going to slip back if I can help it.”

By the 1950s, typecasting was becoming a dirty word. The decade would see Hollywood introduced to a new generation of actors trained in method acting by Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner. Newcomers such as James Dean, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Anne Bancroft, Steve McQueen, Joanne Woodward, Paul Newman and Julie Harris not only ranged in their acting, but projected emotional states few actors had before. Adding to the mix were thespians from Britain, such as Deborah Kerr, Richard Burton, Audrey Hepburn, Rex Harrison, Peter O’Toole and Alec Guinness.

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First Post Studio System Winners & Losers

However, while many Classic Hollywood stars tried to press the envelopes of their personas, few risked breaking out of them. Underscoring this risk were against-type flops such as:

• John Wayne in “The Conqueror” (1956): Wayne’s depiction of Genghis Kahn did not conquer moviegoers, who saw the Iowa-born American film icon utterly unbelievable as a Mongolian emperor.

• Spencer Tracy in “The Old Man and Sea” (1958): According to the biography Papa Hemingway by A.E. Hotchner, Ernest Hemingway described Tracy’s portrayal of his Cuban protagonist as a “fat, rich actor trying to play a fisherman.”

• James Stewart in “Vertigo” (1958):This film today is considered a masterpiece, but not so when it was released. Moviegoers in 1958 could not accept America’s “everyman” going clinically crazy over a skank like Kim Novak. The real Jimmy Stewart would have married Barbara Bel Geddes!

• Doris Day in “Midnight Lace” (1960): During what seems 108 minutes of Doris Day sobbing, America’s favorite romantic comedy sweetheart is terrorized by a stalker who turns out to be her evil English husband. Day vowed never to take another role like it again.

On the other hand, there were successes such as:

• Mickey Rooney in “Quicksand” (1950): The Andy Hardy series made Rooney the top box office attraction from 1939 to 1941. In 16 light comedies, Rooney played America’s innocent nice boy teamed with costars such as Judy Garland, Ann Rutherford and Bonita Granville. In “Quicksand,” Rooney teams with co-star Peter Lorre in a film noir that has Rooney sink from pilfering $20 from the cash register to strangling his boss. We can only imagine what Judge Hardy would say. However, the film earned enough to enable Rooney to star in other B movies until his career resurged to A movies in the 1960s.
  
  
• Jean Arthur in “Shane” (1953): Film historian James Harvey wrote: "No one was more closely identified with the screwball comedy than Jean Arthur. So much was she part of it, so much was her star personality defined by it, that the screwball style itself seems almost unimaginable without her." George Stevens, who directed Arthur in some of those comedies, called her "one of the greatest comedians the screen has ever seen." And yet, Arthur’s biggest box office success, also directed by Stevens, would come at age 50 playing a Wyoming homesteader in the Western drama “Shane.” According to a Hollywood Lexicon survey of national television networks, “Shane” was easily the most televised film of the 1950s from 2018 through 2020.
   
• Tyrone Power in “Witness for the Prosecution” (1957): Longtime swashbuckler and romantic lead Tyrone Power plays accused murderer Leonard Vole in this Agatha Christie whodunnit in which Power is the who. The actor had long wanted to be liberated from his type, which often had him costumed in tights. The Billy Wilder-directed film was a hit, one critic calling “superb” Power’s performance as a "seedy, stop-at-nothing exploiter of women." Power’s death scene would be his last, both in the film and real life. The 44-year-old actor died the following year from a heart attack while filming “Solomon and Sheba.”

• Elizabeth Taylor in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966):Taylor had acted in films since 1942 and was regarded as Hollywood’s most glamourous actress when at age 34 she played the spiteful and raucous 50-year-old Martha. Taylor gained weight, wore a wig, and used make-up to look older and haggard. It’s been suggested that Tayler’s Hollywood persona was the alter ego of the personality she played as Martha.  In any case, Taylor’s performance won her an Academy Award and served as a model for other glamourous actresses, such as Charlize Theron, whose performance in “Monster” (2003) won an Oscar.
  
  
• Tony Curtis in “The Boston Strangler” (1969): With the popularity of his comedies fading, Curtis took a $100,000 pay cut to play serial killer Albert DeSalvo. This was especially risky because the film’s subject was so deplored as a source for entertainment. Wrote critic Roger Ebert: “This film, which was made so well, should not have been made at all.” Still, Curtis received a Golden Globe nomination for his performance and, more important, saw his career revive.

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Playing Against James Bond

One risk of playing against type is that it will detract from the image that has made an actor popular. The reward is that it will establish an actor as bankable to play different types. There is, however, a third possibility: neither of the above.

In this third case, which applies to actors associated with franchises, the type played against is unassailable but also inescapable. For instance, most fans of Basil Rathbone cannot name any of the roles, many of which were of the horror genre, that he played after Sherlock Holmes. Mark Hamill, typed as Luke Skywalker by the Star Wars franchise, could not land a film role for six years after “Return of the Jedi” (1984), and is rarely remembered for anything after that until he appeared in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” (2017).

However, the most interesting example of the franchise type is Sean Connery as James Bond. After his sixth Bond film, “Diamonds Are Forever” (1971), Connery starred mainly in offbeat action roles as his career declined. He would finally relent and play Bond in “Never Say Never Again” (1983), albeit as a middle-aged Bond in the twilight of his career. The film was successful but led Connery’s acting career to a dead end. The actor would not land a leading role again until he played against type as the Franciscan friar William of Baskerville in “Name of the Rose” (1986). His casting dismayed novel author Umberto Eco and caused Columbia to abandon U.S. distribution rights to 20th Century Fox. Although a flop in the United States, the film was a hit internationally and proved pivotal to Connery’s career beyond his bankability.

As William, Connery played an ecclesiastical mentor to an apprentice played by Christian Slater. He would next play a warrior mentor to Christopher Lambert’s character in the British action-fantasy film “Highlander” (1986). Connery's mentor type would then be combined with his middle-aged James Bond persona to reboot hs career as the mentor of Hollywood's new action leads. This updated type would earn Connery an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as Kevin Costner’s mentor in “The Untouchables” (1987). Connery would then mentor Mark Harmon in “The Presidio” (1988), Harrison Ford in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989), Alec Baldwin in “The Hunt for Red October” (1990), Wesley Snipes in “Rising Sun” (1993) and Catherine Zeta-Jones in “Entrapment” (1999).

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Playing Against Non-Action Type

Two stars of Hollywood’s most successful action franchises escaped typecasting because they were cast as action heroes against type. The actors were:

• Michael Keaton in the title role of “Batman” (1989). The problem casting the caped crusader was that no serious action star wanted to play a comic book character, especially one that Hollywood’s first Batman, Adam West, had successfully portrayed as camp. Keaton received the role because director Tim Burton had directed him in “Beetlejuice” (1988) and because Keaton’s pained countenance was regarded suited to a psychologically tormented Bruce Wayne. Word that Keaton would play the superhero resulted in Warner Brothers receiving more than 50,000 protest letters from comic book fans fearing another spoof. Even Keaton initially thought his role would be comedic. Too dark would be the main criticism of this box office hit whose sequel also starred Keaton.
  
  
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• Matt Damon as Jason Borne in “Borne Identity” (2002). Damon underwent three months of training in martial arts and weapons preparing for his first action role. Which was understandable because the 5’10” Harvard graduate’s type was all brains and no brawn. Director Doug Liman cast Damon after several action types turned the role down, including Russell Crowe, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Brad Pitt. Damon grabbed the role because his career as a leading man was tanking. However, the problem remained that the film called for fight scenes as high octane physically as any Sean Connery Bond film. Imagining Damon fighting hand-to-hand against Donald Grant on the Orient Express in “From Russia with Love” (1963) or against Odd Job inside Fort Knox in “Goldfinger” (1964) is too much of a stretch. The solution: MTV-style editing. Unlike traditional continuity editing, MTV-style portrays action with fast cuts that leap and bound frenetically through space and time. This new style not only transformed Damon’s career but changed how action movies are made, including Bond films.  

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Stars Moving to the Dark Side

Author Graham Greene wrote: “A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.”

Given the virtuous images of the following stars, the characters they played against type were among the screen’s top monsters.

•  Harrison Ford in “What Lies Beneath” (2000): As Han Solo in the Star Wars franchise and Indiana Jones in the Indiana Jones franchise, Ford played heroes so true blue that they were in the B-movie mold. He also played the devoted and heroic family man in “Frantic” (1988) and “Patriot Games” (1992), as well as a police officer in “Witness” (1985), “The Devil’s Own” (1997) and “Random Hearts” (1999). Ford’s one brush with the law came in “The Fugitive” (1993) playing Dr. Richard Kimble, a falsely accused wife killer who is finally exonerated by a federal marshal played by Tommy Lee Jones. Not even Tommy Lee, however, would have suspected that “What Lies Beneath” is about a sociopathic killer lurking beneath Ford’s professorial character.  
  
  
• Charlize Theron in “Monster” (2003): Tall and gorgeous, South African Theron not surprisingly began her career as a fashion model in Milan. One of her first starring roles was in “Mighty Joe Young” (1998), whose few highlights included “mouthwatering shots of Charlize Theron,” according to CNN critic Paul Clinton. In 1999, the magazine Vanity Fair featured Theron on the cover of its January issue with the caption, “White Hot Venus.”  Discussing her acting career, Theron remarked: “(I) knew it was going to be harder for me, because of what I look like, to branch out to different kinds of roles." She was one of Hollywood’s top leading ladies when she took the role of real-life prostitute and executed serial killer Aileen Wuornos in “Monster.” Theron gained 30 pounds, shaved her eyebrows and wore prosthetic teeth for a role that earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2003.
  
  
• Steve Carell in “Foxcatcher” (2014): “Look at Steve Carell’s close-ups” in the TV series “The Office” and his comedy movies “and you’ll swear his pupils are rotating.” So observed “Blog of the Gray Geezer” about an actor who, before 2014, fit in the lovable and innocent dunce tradition of Jerry Lewis and Adam Sandler. In “Foxcatcher,” Carell takes his first plunge into a drama combining the very untypical themes of wrestling, cocaine and murder. Carell plays true-life John E. du Pont, heir to the du Pont fortune, who in 1996 murdered Mark Schulz, an Olympic wrestler residing at the training facility du Pont sponsored on his estate. To resemble the billionaire, Carell donned a prosthetic nose which he frequently and snootily looked down.  His performance conveys why in real life du Pont was found “guilty but mentally ill” and received a sentence of 13 to 30 years.

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Comedy Against Drama & Vice Versa

Many actors have successfully played both comedic and dramatic roles, but few were comedians in dramatic roles or dramatic actors in comedic roles. Such was the rule until 1980, when Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves and Leslie Nielsen, dramatic actors who rarely if ever made moviegoers smile, were cast in the spoof “Airplane” (1980). Ranked in 2008 by the American Film Institute as one of the top 10 comedies ever made, the film’s signature is dramatic actors playing against type. And none more benefited from “Airplane” than Leslie Nielsen even though eight years would pass before he again played against type in the Naked Gun franchise.

The franchise’s hit comedies “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!” (1988), “The Naked Gun 2 ½: The Smell of Fear” (1991) and “The Naked Gun 33 ½: The Final Insult” (1994), were, like “Airplane,” produced by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker.  And like “Airplane,” dramatic actors were cast in comedic roles, e.g., George Kennedy, Nancy Marchand, Robert Goulet, Lloyd Bochner and Fred Ward.  None, however, were more suited to the goofy than Nielsen, who starred as the deadpan Lt. Frank Drebin in all three films. Asked to explain his comedic success, Nielsen quipped that his type was comedic and that he had been cast against type throughout the first half of his career.

At the other end of the spectrum, comedians are expected, unlike actors in comedies, to be personally funny. While the humor of actors is generated by the story, comedians add chuckles with, among other things, comedic timing, ridiculous visuals, breaking the fourth wall and cracking jokes for the benefit of the audience rather than the film’s narrative. Few comedians have attempted playing against type let alone have been so successful at it as Robin Williams. A predictor of Williams’ acting range was his ability as a comedian to improvise different characters. His initial dramatic roles included a teacher in “Dead Poet’s Society” (1989) and a psychologist in “Good Will Hunting” (1997), the latter winning him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. However, roles that were strictly against a comedian’s type included the murderer in “Insomnia” (2002) and the lunatic in “One Hour Photo” (2002).  According to critic Roger Ebert, Williams’ “open-faced, smiling madmen” made moviegoers accept him in these roles. We now know that behind that smile was a dark side that led Williams to hang himself in 2014.

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