5 Actors Who Keep Playing Weirdly Specific Roles

Perhaps still searching for the perfect mind-swap role that would finally fulfill him, in 2015, Reynolds starred in Self/less as a man who pays off his daughter's medical bills by selling his body to a company that implants the consciousness of a dying billionaire inside him, artificially extending the billionaire's life. A sort of similar thing happens in 2016's Criminal, only it's Reynolds' consciousness that gets implanted in the brain of a sociopath played by Kevin Costner. Both movies asked complicated questions about the profound connection between mind and body, but only one has a "Please take me seriously again!"-era Kevin Costner, so I guess you know which one you're watching tonight.

A few years later, Mads starred in the Danish film Valhalla Rising, in which he plays a viking warrior called One-Eye -- a nickname he did not get ironically. 2016 then came around and saw the release of Doctor Strange, in which Mikkelsen plays an evil sorcerer with burns around his eyes. It would have been funnier if Benedict Cumberbatch's Doctor Strange had been an optometrist in the movie, but I suppose you can't have it all.

2019 did not slow down Mads' weird vendetta against his eyes, as he played Duncan Vizla, aka "the Black Kaiser," in the Netflix action thriller Polar, for which he sported a fashionable eye patch. And what does the future hold for him? Well, we know he's providing motion capture, 3D scans, and vocal performances for Hideo Kojima's upcoming game Death Stranding, and screenshots confirm that even if his face doesn't get mauled, he does smear some shit across his eye for dramatic effect:

In X-Men: Days Of Future Past, Dinklage took a break from fighting kings to focus more on his superweapon hobby by constructing the mutant-hunting Sentinel robots. But that's probably because he'd already had his fill of attempted regicide from The Angry Birds Movie (in which he voiced Mighty Eagle, who fights against King Mudbeard) and The Chronicles Of Narnia: Prince Caspian, where he plays Trumpkin the dwarf, who wants to overthrow the unjust king of Narnia. No, really, that's his actual name. Trumpkin the dwarf. I'm so sorry, Peter. You deserve so much better.

From there, Johansson moved to Lucy, which was a kind of mix between Her and Under The Skin. She gets a kilo of a superpower drug literally kicked into her, and she gains an increasingly number of abilities, including telepathy, telekinesis, an immunity to pain, and whatever the writers felt like at the time, eventually becoming the next stage of human evolution. She then ingests more of the drug and turns into ... a pitch-black, seemingly featureless goo-alien, after which she moves to a world beyond physical space and gives humanity a weird "You can do it!" film-ending pep talk.

Finally, in 2017, Johansson starred in Ghost In The Shell as Mira Killian, the first successful transplant of a human mind into a fully cybernetic body (Ryan Reynolds must have turned this one down). It's a profound example of artificial evolution that allows humans to transcend our physical bodies and limitations. Also the need for clothes.

One of Watts' earliest roles was in the straight-to-video schlock fest Children Of The Corn IV: The Gathering, which can most generously be described as a movie that came out in 1996. There, Watts played Grace, a medical student fighting a demonic child preacher whose magic takes over the minds of the local kids and turns them into homicidal monsters. Grace ends up defeating the preacher by showering him in mercury while the audience desperately hopes that Blockbuster offers refunds.

From then on, it seemed like Watts was trying to cinematically talk herself out of ever having kids, although she now has two, so, you know, that's awkward. In 2002, she starred in the American remake of The Ring, in which she battled a demonic ghost child killing people via a cursed videotape. Sorry, I guess I should explain that for younger readers: See, before Earth turned into Hellworld, dying was something that people wanted to avoid. Watts played the same role in The Ring 2, and after that things went quiet on the creepy kid front ... or so we thought.

She never truly escaped this curse, as we see in 2016's Shut In. Here she plays the stepmother of a disturbed kid who gets into an accident and pretends to be in a vegetative state for six months so he can be closer to her. While this is happening, ANOTHER kid is living in Watts' crawlspace, turning Shut In into one of the greatest birth control methods ever.

Technically, you can also mention Movie 43, which has a kid called Kevin, who has a mop with Watts' character's face on it that he calls his girlfriend. But I don't know if this counts, because Watts is the one who made him that way. Through homeschooling. Because she's Kevin's mother. Ha! That's ... comedy?

Cezary is a freelance writer and editor. You should follow him on Twitter.

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