Sometimes an actor gets typecast, and it’s bad for their career, but sometimes it’s not that they’ve been typecast, it’s just that they’ve found a particular, comfortable niche, and it’s neither good nor bad, but simply strange. This is how accidental subgenres are born.
Eight well-known actors have unwittingly embarked upon the establishment of such subgenres. In one case, the martial arts star in question was ᴅᴇᴀᴅ before it spawned. In other cases, the star simply went back to the same well repeatedly until it became their thing.
There are also cases of stars playing basically the same role more than once, seemingly by coincidence, until it feels like they have some weird itch they’re unconsciously scratching.
Liam Neeson’s “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Taken” Movies
Taken made Liam Neeson an action star. That was a ball he was happy to run with, establishing a grizzled tough-guy persona that’s so iconic, he can lampoon himself in The Naked Gun, and everyone gets it.
Not all Neeson’s action movies follow the “Taken on a —-” template, but many do. Non-Stop is Taken on a Plane, while The Commuter is Taken on a Train. Cold Pursuit is Taken in the Snow and A Walk Among the Tombstones is Serious Taken. The Honest Thief and The Marksman both belong to Neeson’s well-stocked subgenre, albeit more loosely.
Neeson has expressed some embarrᴀssment over the Taken series, and annoyance over constantly being asked to record his “particular set of skills” speech as a voicemail.
If a movie stars Neeson as a man with skills, who must take down a bunch of bad guys in order to rescue/avenge someone, it’s an ICBINT. Ice Road: Vengeance is the most recent example, as it ups the Taken factor over the first Ice Road, which arguably does not fit the subgenre.
The 2023 thriller Retribution is not a Taken-style action film, but it does involve a threat to Neeson’s family, so it can be considered borderline ICBINT. Schindler’s List is also borderline, as Neeson tries to rescue people, though not in an action-hero sense.
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s Jungle Movies
Dwayne Johnson has made five movies set in the jungle, two of which have “Jungle” in the тιтle, three if you count one film’s international тιтle.
The Rundown was Johnson’s second movie as a leading actor, and his first foray into the setting that would become his favorite. Appropriately тιтled Welcome to the Jungle for international audiences, the movie casts The Rock as a bounty hunter sent to Brazil to retrieve his employer’s estranged son.
Johnson later played an adventurous construction worker in the largely jungle-set Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, the sequel to 2008’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. After two well-spaced jungle movies, the lean-in began with 2017’s Jumanji reboot, appropriately subтιтled Welcome to the Jungle, and 2019’s Jumanji: The Next Level.
The Rock’s Jungle Movies became recognized as an official subgenre with the release of 2021’s Disney extravaganza Jungle Cruise, a film clearly made as a Pirates of the Caribbean replacement, which, unlike Pirates, did not immediately launch a franchise.
Double Jean-Claude Van Damme
Jean-Claude Van Damme loves playing twins. His first film to employ the JCVD-squared gimmick, Double Impact, was not only headlined by The Muscles from Brussels as brothers, it was produced and written by him. He also choreographed the fights.
Maximum Risk followed a few years later. The film does not see two Van Dammes sharing the screen, but rather hinges on the plot device of others thinking Van Damme’s character is a different character whom he physically resembles, for reasons that are not shocking at all when revealed (he had a twin brother he never knew about).
In yet another variation on the double-JCVD gimmick, Replicant has him playing not twins, but clones. This 2001 direct-to-video release was quickly followed by the Van Damme-penned The Order, which sees the star playing both a modern-day treasure hunter and a knight in the year 1099.
Jason Statham’s “Profession” Movies
Jason Statham had no idea what he’d started when he played the тιтular transporter in 2002’s The Transporter, the first of his films whose тιтle directly refers to his character’s job.
Statham did The Italian Job in 2003, and the entirely unrelated The Bank Job in 2008. He walked in the footsteps of Charles Bronson in 2011’s The Mechanic remake, which got a subgenre-padding sequel in 2016. Sandwiched between those was 2015’s Spy, a rare comedic turn, which took in a mᴀssive $235 million box office haul.
2024’s The Beekeeper saw Statham tackling his most off-beat profession to date, though in addition to being a literal beekeeper, his character is also, somewhat more typically for the action star, a former operative attached to a mysterious agency called Beekeepers.
The Beekeeper 2 is currently in production, and recently cast Jeremy Irons to reprise his role from the original.
While The Beekeeper saw Statham doing a hyper-specific job, his 2025 subgenre entry went the opposite way, at least in тιтling. A Working Man cast him as a construction worker who, of course, used to be a commando.
Bruce Lee – Bruceploitation
Bruce Lee was a martial arts movie legend in Asia before Enter the Dragon, but he didn’t become a worldwide superstar until after the film’s release. Sadly, his great fame came posthumously, as he pᴀssed away in 1973.
Movies using footage of Lee continued being released after his death. Unsettling as that may be, it was even weirder when filmmakers looking to cash in on the star’s fame began churning out films starring Bruce Lee lookalikes, one of whom was unsubtly named Bruce Li.
“Bruceploitation,” therefore, has a double-meaning: it conveys that these are cheap exploitation pictures, while branding their very existence as exploitative of Lee’s image.
Bruceploitation films come in three main flavors: biopics (Bruce Lee’s Secret, Exit the Dragon), re-hashes of Lee’s films (Re-Enter the Dragon, Enter Three Dragons) and films whose plots hinge on Lee being resurrected from the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ (The Clones of Bruce Lee, The Dragon Lives Again).
This disreputable subgenre even got a parody film, when Lee’s protégé Sammo Hung made Enter the Fat Dragon.
Ed Harris In Command
For a period of time, largely in the 1990s, if you needed an actor to play someone confined mostly to a single location, who spends the whole movie giving orders, either calmly or super-dramatically, you called Ed Harris.
The Harris In Command subgenre’s most famous entry is Apollo 13, starring Harris as the control-room-bound flight commander. He got an Oscar nomination for being in command of an ill-fated NASA mission, and later, got another one for being in command of Jim Carrey’s entire existence in The Truman Show.
Harris’ versatility shows through in the level of villainy his commanding characters achieve. He’s at least an ambiguous character in The Truman Show, but in The Rock he’s a flat-out bad guy, a terrorist who spends most of the movie in dank Alcatraz, yelling his demands into phones.
Harris reportedly broke multiple phones while shooting The Rock, as he slammed them down in frustration at flubbing his lines.
Snowpiercer tapped Harris’ commanding presence too, casting him as the creator/caretaker of the тιтular apocalypse train’s engine. Gravity then paid homage to Harris’ Apollo 13 work, casting the star as the voice of mission control.
Rachel McAdams’ “Time Travel Love Interest” Movies
Why does Rachel McAdams star in so many time-travel movies, and why does she never play the time-traveler herself, but the love-interest of the time-traveler?
McAdams’ truly weird subgenre had its genesis in 2009’s The Time-Traveler’s Wife, with Eric Bana as a man unstuck in time, and McAdams as his confused spouse. It seemed an innocent coincidence, to those who even noticed, when she again played the love interest of a man sent inexplicably tumbling through time in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.
Coincidence became trend when McAdams starred in About Time, playing the love interest to Domhnall Gleeson as a man from a whole family of people whose superpower lets them go back in time and tinker with their own destinies.
One step beyond trend lies subgenre. McAdams firmly cemented one, completely by accident, when she starred in the MCU’s Doctor Strange, as the woman who gets to stand by while her super-brilliant, magical doctor ex-boyfriend does incredible superhero things, including riding a time loop.
The “Matt Damon Needs To Be Saved” Series
Saving Matt Damon would be an appropriate name for this subgenre, which includes a whopping eight examples, highlighted by Saving Private Ryan, with Damon as the тιтular Private Ryan, who must be saved from WW2.
But Damon needed saving even before Private Ryan. Released two years earlier, Courage Under Fire saw the actor in a small role as one of several soldiers rescued from a downed Black Hawk helicopter. Good Will Hunting sneaks into the subgenre too, as Damon plays a troubled man who must be saved from his own demons.
Damon could not be saved from being cast in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Damon has only a voice role in the animated тιтan A.E., but his character still needs saving (from a planet being attacked by hostile aliens). The actor then took an 11-year break from his own subgenre, finally getting back in with 2010’s Green Zone, in which he’s captured by the Iraqi military, and saved by special forces.
The last three Saving Matt Damon movies are all sci-fi. In Elysium, Damon must be saved from an environmentally compromised Earth. In Interstellar, he plays a scientist stranded on a distant planet. Lastly, in The Martian, he plays a man stranded on the not-so-distant Mars, with only science to save him.
