Multiple Actors, Same Role

It was my cousin's graduation from Georgetown University when he told me about what he considered the greatest show in television history: The Wire. That was in 2006. After receiving the complete five season collection of DVDs for Decemberween in the 2010, and subsequently binging the seasons (now multiple times over the years), I, too, am a singer of The Wire's GOAT status.

Anyway, it's always fun to see the actors in other places. And that led, tangentially, to the kernel of this post. Also, being a fan of The Wire could easily ruin your view of other police-procedural shows. One of the three police procedural shows Corrie's enjoyed over the years was Bones, starring Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz; it's a combination of gruesome and hilarious.

The second show I'm going to waste spend time mentioning is Cold Case. This show would air on Fridays right when we moved to Long Beach, and I mean all day. It would start at noon and play until 2 am, the last episode started at 1 am. Not that we watched it for that long, but the marathon days were a thing of the local channel (Wednesday was this show, Thursday was that show, Friday was Cold Case).

The premise of Cold Case I poo-pooed from the start, because of my affection of The Wire, but it works for a weekly television cop show. The detail comes to a very old case (a "cold case") and at the end of each episode, the mystery is solved (like all police procedurals). One wrinkle is that the time period in which the murder was committed takes up about half the episode, with period costumes and, the kicker, period music. I'd wager their budget was half music.

Anyway, the rhythms of each episode were always the same (as are every cop show), and the characters endearing enough, that it provided nice background noise. ANOTHER thing was cool recognizing actors from other shows you like (or, namely, The Wire). Actors need work, and a whole buttload of actors I recognized from different shows---and not just the Wire---were there. Sometimes cool actors would play the same characters over a many year timespan.

Seeing Michael B. Jordan and Maestro Harrell (Wallace and Randy Wagstaff from The Wire) in the same episode was pretty cool. They weren't playing the same character, rather half-brothers. This was after Jordan played ("Where the fuck is") Wallace but before he got yolked for Creed and Black Panther.

I'd been wanting to do a post about actors playing the same character for a while, but after seeing the German series Dark, I realized a person could do a whole dissertation on actors playing different characters, from kids, to teens, to forty-somethings to septuagenarians.

But when we were checking the third police-procedural show that Corrie liked back in the early 20teens, Without a Trace, that I realized I should narrow my focus. Without a Trace is a kidnap-recovery FBI procedural, and the urgency is very real. The "before disappearance" scenes are shot and placed like with Cold Case, but the timing is different. Bones has a different urgency, more scientific discovery-oriented Cold Case kind of show, but sometimes it does have an urgency different that Cold Case.

After seeing a random handful of episodes, Without a Trace is a show mostly about "unspeakable tragedy."

Anyway, again, an episode had the before- and after-disappearance storyline about a character who "won" a contest and subjected herself to the plastic surgery heavy prize. When I noticed the actresses playing the Before and After versions of the character, my focus narrowed (as I mentioned above).

Dark notwithstanding, any conversation about different actors playing the same character begins Vito Corelone, with the elder, Marlon Brando, and the younger, Robert De Niro, both being nominated for Oscars in different years for their Vito performances:

One episode of Cold Case about the development of orchestral funk out of the rhythm & blues mainstays of the era had two of my favorite cameos playing the same character, a ruthless producer:

With Jamie Hector, you either recognize Marlo Stanfield, or you don't. The older dude is Steven Williams, known to nerds like me as Mr. X, one of Fox Mulder's reluctant helper's from the middle seasons of The X-Files. Marlo and Mr. X playing the same character. It was dope.

The next pair played a character only a few months apart from each other, and they got two decent actors to fill the roles. The After-version was the one we see first, and I recognized her immediately as Liz Berkley, Kelly from Saved By. the Bell and the protagonist from Showgirls. The Before-version I recognized as well, but it took a minute to find her real name:

Do you see it? Her, I mean? It's Flo, from the insurance commercials. Stephanie Courtney is thew actress's name, and you can see from this episode (and her portrayals of Flo's family in the various commercials) that her acting chops are legit.

Having just returned from Texas and our 4th of July trip, this post (which was started a month ago) will eventually get forgotten underneath either a flood of posts or a gargantuan few. So...eh...watch The Wire...? If you haven't yet, DO IT, and if you have already...watch it again; you won't be disappointed.