5 Famous Actors That Oddly Repeat Themselves
From time to time we all tend to repeat ourselves, which is why from time to time we all tend to repeat ourselves. The same is true with actors. Let's face it, acting is a hard job -- if it wasn't, we'd all be busy watching From Justin to Kelly for the four billionth time right now. Even some of our greatest living thespians aren't immune from revisiting oddly specific character beats over and over again; like how Naomi Watts is always hanging around with creepy goth kids, and Tom Hanks is basically a stray dog to the fire hydrant that is cinema. Well, it turns out that yet more movie stars are locked into familiar patterns, such as how ...
Jason Statham Swimming Is The New Tom Cruise Running
We all know that Tom Cruise's preferred mode of transportation is desperately sprinting for dear life with the wind blowing through his suspiciously dark hair. Well similarly, Jason Statham apparently loves to hit the water and swim because he does it so often in his movies that his fingers are probably less soulful versions of the California Raisins at this point. Obviously Statham dons a wetsuit for The Meg, the 2018 aquatic creature feature.
But before that in Transporter 3, Statham's Frank Martin escapes a wrecked car that's been submerged underwater; a scene that would have been more suspenseful if we hadn't already seen him triumphantly swim away from a goddamn plane crash in Transporter 2 for the exciting climax that critics called "so inconceivably stupid."
Even scenes that don't necessarily need to take place in the water somehow do if Statham's involved; like in Crank when he meets with a crime boss while treading water in a swimming pool to keep his heart rate up. Now it does occur to us that all of this may be because Statham was a former professional diver in the past.
Which would also explain why Mechanic: Resurrection literally finds him diving to freedom from a Malaysian prison. Plus, according to Statham, his swimming skills literally saved his actual, non-cinematic life during a stunt gone wrong on the set of The Expendables 3. As far as we know, Tom Cruise has never successfully run away from anything in the real world, other than his own insecurities about aging.
Boy, Cars Sure Hate Miles Teller
You know actor Miles Teller from the godawful Fantastic Four reboot, cringe magazine interviews, and movies where his characters have had worse luck with motor vehicles than the cast of Maximum Overdrive. Most famously, there's Whiplash, in which Teller gets sideswiped on the way to his jazz drumming concert, then crawls out of the wreck and eventually gives the bloodiest live musical performance since G.G Allin.
Similarly he suffers a broken neck after a head-on collision in Bleed for This, and in The Spectacular Now he gets in an accident while under the influence, breaking his girlfriend's arm.
In Rabbit Hole, his character tragically hits and kills a child, and in War Dogs his truck mysteriously won't start during a chase. Teller also co-starred in the 2011 remake of the classic Footloose which, like the original, concerns a town that has outlawed dancing following a car crash that killed partying teens ... instead of, you know, just cracking down on drunk driving. (We checked, it's for sure cars. They didn't update the story for 2011 by changing it to a deadly Segway scooter accident or anything.) In real life, too, Teller himself has survived multiple car accidents, once when he was only twenty and again when he was twenty-nine. Maybe someone should offer him a nice movie about the joys of power walking for a change.
Michelle Monaghan is great -- but too often she turns up in a movie playing the wife of some emotionally-exhausting, self-absorbed dude. Take the Mission: Impossible franchise, in which she is tormented and nearly killed because her husband Ethan Hunt neglected to tell her that he secretly works for the IMF government agency. Even after they break up, he routinely shows up to charmingly stalk her, lurking in the shadows like some kind of jacked Michael Myers.
In True Detective she's Maggie, the put-upon wife to Woody Harrelson's Detective Marty Hart, a skeezy lout who's having an affair with a much younger woman, prompting her to sleep with his partner Rust, because infidelity is a flat circle.
In Machine Gun Preacher she's the supportive wife who talks her husband through Sudanese warfare while shopping for eggs at the grocery store. And she stars as an expectant mother in a movie literally called Due Date, but the story still focuses on the trials and tribulations of her hotshot husband played by Robert Downey Jr. And in the recent The Craft: Legacy, she's shacked up with David Duchovny who turns out (SPOILERS) to be a middle-aged evil warlock. Let's make it so that Monaghan has more healthy on-screen relationships with dudes who aren't played by Casey Affleck.
In the season one finale of The Handmaid's Tale we find out that Offred, formerly June, played by Elisabeth Moss is pregnant -- which is a big reveal for the character, but not necessarily a giant shock considering she's part of a patriarchal dystopia's forced breeding program.
Weirdly, though, several other Elisabeth Moss projects also involve story twists in which she discovers an unwanted pregnancy. Like in Mad Men, Peggy Olsen heads to the doctor suspecting that a recent bout of nausea was simply due to a "bad sandwich" only to discover that her recent weight gain was due to the fact that she was "expecting." Surprisingly, the 1960s doctor somehow resists the urge to follow his diagnosis by blowing a giant puff of cigarette smoke in her face.
And in the recent The Invisible Man remake, Moss' character learns that she was secretly inseminated by her abusive ex (who, unless the title didn't tip you off, is as invisible as Kevin Bacon's wang).
Bruce Willis Keeps Meeting His Past Self
There are only two movies where Bruce Willis' Christmas plans are interrupted by a squad of armed goons, but there are way more movies where ol' Bruce meets a younger version of himself. Like in 12 Monkeys, the movie about an apocalyptic future in which human civilization has been wiped out by a deadly virus that used to be a whole lot more fun to watch. Bruce travels to the past and eventually learns that his recurring dream of a mysterious dude being shot in an airport was really a memory! In the end, his past self witnesses the death of his future self, who happens to be dressed like Dog The Bounty Hunter Goes Hawaiian for some reason.
Then there's Disney's The Kid, the 2000 family comedy about a heartless executive whose eight-year-old self magically appears in the future. He eventually learns to not be such a dick all the time, while informing his past self about the imminent death of their mother -- but somehow forgetting to ask him to pop some anonymous warnings to Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy in the mail when he gets back to 1968.
Then there was Looper -- which was pretty much the exact same story as The Kid but instead of learning a valuable lesson about self-forgiveness, the two Bruces are just trying to murder each other for two hours. And young Bruce is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt with a modified hairline.
And lest we forget Surrogates in which Willis himself plays a robotic version of, essentially, the tight jeans and shitty harmonica-era Bruce Willis.
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Top Image: Warner Bros.
