13 Times Wholesome Actors Took On Controversial Roles And Changed Their Image

Even for established stars like Ian McKellan, Liv Tyler, and Hugo Weaving, The Lord of the Rings trilogy was a career-defining franchise that overshadowed the movies they made before and after. For 19-year-old Elijah Wood, who had worked steadily as a child actor in the preceding decade but never hit major success, it was both a rocket launcher to stardom and a professional straight-jacket. As Frodo Baggins, the intrepid young hobbit tasked with delivering the one ring to its destruction in the flames of Mount Doom, Wood shouldered the emotional heart of the multi-billion dollar franchise from the time filming began in 1999 to when The Return of the King swept the Academy Awards five years later. Shooting all three films at once took a toll on the young actor, who revealed that he was consumed by the experience. “My life was so defined by being in New Zealand, by playing this role, by being with these people for so long,” he said in 2021. “I just needed to get a sense of ‘Who am I, what am I, what am I doing?’” Instead of looking for another blockbuster franchise to break away from his association with Middle Earth, he chose to go the opposite direction, seeking projects that were “really small and very different” from the Rings trilogy. 

Wood began his mold-breaking crusade with Charlie Kaufman’s arthouse hit, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in which he plays a memory technician who takes advantage of a woman whose memories were surgically removed. A year later, he played a volatile outcast who joins a violent club of soccer fans in Lexi Alexander’s Green Street Hooligans, and a cannibalistic serial killer in Robert Rodriguez’s graphic and controversial Sin City. One reviewer said that his villainous turn in the movie was so shocking that it was “like discovering that Gandalf used to lure young hobbits into a shed and show them his special wand.” Another called his casting a “thrilling gravitational mismatch.” These roles established Wood as an actor who can be relied upon to pick surprising and occasionally absurd roles and created the blueprint for fellow franchise stars like Daniel Radcliffe and Robert Pattinson. Since his controversial work following the end of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Wood has starred in dark, offbeat projects like the comedy horror flick Come to Daddy, the psychotically gruesome Maniac, and the series Wilfred, in which Wood’s character thinks his neighbor’s dog is an Australian man in a furry suit. 

Young stars who grow up within the world of Disney often struggle to find their footing in more adult roles, but for Anne Hathaway, who starred as a princess in three movies, the task was even harder. The actress got her first major role playing an average teen who discovers she’s the heir to a European kingdom in Garry Marshall’s The Princess Diaries. The movie was a box office hit, earning $108 million domestically and turning Hathaway into a rising star. She went on to appear in family movies like Nicholas Nickleby and Ella Enchanted before making The Princess Diaries sequel in 2004. But despite her childlike persona, she was already pushing for new roles. In an interview just before the sequel was released, the 21-year-old actress bristled at the line of questioning: “I don't mean to roll my eyes and be an ungrateful little b*tch," she said, "It's just that if I get asked one more time: 'If you were a princess, what would you do?'... That's not why I became an actor. And that's not where I intend to stay.” True to her word, her first role post-Princess Diaries was an R-rated crime drama in which she plays the antithesis of the family-friendly fantasy heroines that had come to define her. 

In Barbara Kopple’s Havoc, Hathaway plays a spoiled LA teen who seeks rebellion and excitement through a relationship with a gun-toting drug dealer. Her character has sex, takes drugs, and appears topless in multiple scenes. Hathaway claimed she took the role to be challenged rather than to play against type, but noted later that “anybody who was a role model for children needs a reprieve.” The movie was met with such negative reviews that it went straight to DVD, but Hathaway had another mature role in the pipeline that succeeded in launching her career in a new direction. A year after Havoc flopped, she appeared in Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning romantic drama Brokeback Mountain. Since then, her versatility has been on full display in genres ranging from romantic comedies (The Devil Wears Prada) to a superhero franchise (The Dark Knight Rises. In 2012, she won an Oscar for best supporting actress for her role in Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Disney is firmly in the rearview mirror. 

From the 1930s through the late '50s, Henry Fonda was cast so consistently as a stoic, morally unflinching hero that his presence was shorthand for integrity. From Tom Joad in the 1940 John Ford American epic The Grapes of Wrath to Juror No. 8 in Sidney Lumet’s 1957 classic 12 Angry Men, his characters represented the moral backbone of society in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. He received rave reviews for his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, with the New York Times review calling his performance “one of those once-in-a-blue-moon things,” noting his “strong and honest face.” But even in roles that were less obviously virtuous, he emanated quiet decency, whether he was playing a cowboy, a naive millionaire, or a banker in the Deep South. By 1968, his reputation was so deeply ingrained in the mind of the movie-going public that Spaghetti Western director Sergio Leone wanted to use it against them. The result was Fonda’s first role as an outright villain and one of the most enduring performances of his career.

When Leone approached Fonda to play the role of the rogue gunslinger and child-slayer Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West, the actor was confused and dismissive, only agreeing to take the role when a friend told him he couldn’t miss the chance to work with the famed director. Fonda showed up to the set with brown contact lenses to hide his famous blue eyes and facial hair reminiscent of “the guy who shot Lincoln.” But Leone wanted him to look exactly like himself. In his introductory scene, Fonda’s identity is kept hidden as he is seen from behind slaughtering a family. A terrified child stands in front of him, and as the camera pans around, the killer’s face is finally revealed to be the consummate good guy. By casting Fonda in the irredeemably sadistic role, the director made Frank’s brutality all the more shocking. Despite his reservations about the role, Fonda’s performance was named one of the best villains in cinematic history by Time in 2007.

By the time the final installment of the Harry Potter franchise was released in 2011, 22-year-old Emma Watson had spent nearly half her life associated with her clever, courageous, loyal character, Hermione Granger. The eight Harry Potter movies constituted one of the most successful movie franchises of all time, and its trio of young stars were synonymous with their roles. Audiences watched the actors grow from baby-faced preteens to 20-something veterans of the movie industry, and with only a handful of peripheral projects under their belts, forging new creative identities outside of the wizarding world was an uphill battle. For Watson, the challenge was to avoid being typecast as a sensible rule-follower and prove she had versatility as a performer. Two years after the end of the franchise, she fought for a role that went against everything her Harry Potter character stood for, sending an unmistakable message that she was ready to step into a new phase of her career.

The Bling Ring is a crime drama based on the true story of a group of fame-obsessed 20-somethings who robbed the houses of LA celebrities including Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Orlando Bloom. Watson plays Nicki, a coke-sniffing party girl who takes to the life of crime like a natural and revels in her five minutes of infamy. The actress said she chose the role not because she wanted to distance herself from Hermione but because she wanted to work with director Sofia Coppola:

“I never chose the role, I chose the director. It wasn't like I needed to go out there and try to find the furthest part from Hermione so I could get away from her, because that seems like a negative place to jump off from [...] What I'm trying to get towards is that I want to be a character actress. I want to play parts. I want to play roles that transform me.” 

The Bling Ring did transform her, at least as far as critics were concerned. One review was headlined, “Emma Watson leaves Hermione behind,” while others hailed her as “sensational.” One was even more direct, saying, “The real story here isn’t the good-girl-goes-bad stunt casting; it’s that Watson can act.” Although the actress took fewer roles in the ensuing years, she has continued to err on the side of working with auteur directors, including Darren Aronofsky in 2014’s Noah and Greta Gerwig in 2019’s Little Women.

Natalie Portman’s transition to adult roles was so successful that it’s easy to forget she was once a child star. But from her breakthrough debut as Mathilda in Léon: The Professional to her regal teenage turn as Padmé in the Star Wars prequels, her childlike charm was so much a part of her persona that she reportedly lost the role of Juliet in Baz Lurhmann’s Romeo and Juliet because she “seemed so young that Leonardo DiCaprio’s Romeo appeared to be molesting her.” Cameron Crowe also cited her sheen of innocence when he declined to cast her as Penny Lane in Almost Famous, opting for Kate Hudson instead. At the beginning of her career, Portman was outspoken about avoiding sexualized roles, turning down Adrian Lyne’s Lolita and Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm because of their adult themes. But in 2004, the 22-year-old actress appeared in a movie that focuses on the most intimate and painful machinations of two couples whose overlapping relationships are rife with sexually charged melodrama.

Directed by Mike Nichols, Closer stars Portman, Jude Law, Julia Roberts, and Clive Owen as the lovers in question. Portman is Alice, the on-again, off-again girlfriend of Law’s character who is frequently cheated on in favor of Roberts. Alice’s profession as a stripper and the eroticism that pervades the movie were publicity fodder long before it played out across cinemas, leading people to believe that Portman intended to become “an Internet sex icon.” But despite the frenzy in the press, Nichols cut scripted nudity at the actress’s request, and Portman said that she took the role because she wanted to work with the legendary director rather than because she wanted to overhaul her image. Regardless of her reasons, the decision paid off. She won an Oscar nomination for the role and earned rave reviews. One critic called her performance “revelatory,” while another said it was “far and away the best performance of the adult portion of her career.” Following Closer, she became one of the most recognizable and respected actresses of her generation, winning an Oscar for her dark performance in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, and erring toward playing complex, challenging women in movies like Annihilation, Jackie, and Vox Lux.

Julie Andrews became acquainted with the double-edged sword of typecasting early in her movie career when she won an Oscar for her starring role in Mary Poppins in 1965. With her cut-glass British accent, impeccable posture, and mischievous wit, she was the perfect candidate to play another nanny in a G-rated musical, Maria, in The Sound of Music. These movies, which came out less than a year apart, defined her image as virtuous and prim to the point of virginal. But Andrews had much more to offer, and although she never achieved the stardom associated with her two early roles, she went on to appear in a variety of movies that did not have “G” in their rating. The most notorious example is the 1981 satire S.O.B., which was written and directed by her husband, Blake Edwards. 

S.O.B. is an acidic takedown of Hollywood, full of jabs about money-grubbing producers, self-indulgent directors, and mercenary agents. Andrews plays Sally Miles, a star of children’s musicals whose director husband is floundering after a colossal flop. He decides he’ll make his next movie a hit by forcing his kid-friendly wife to bare her breasts in a psychosexual nightmare of a musical number. She complies (to sweeten their divorce settlement), and thus, Mary Poppins went topless. Not surprisingly, “Mary Poppins goes topless” accounted for much of the publicity surrounding the film. Andrews downplayed the scene, saying that it was “a very good role” and that the only drawback was that she was cold in the studio. The movie was well-received by critics who called Andrews “utterly charming,” but it flopped with audiences. S.O.B. was intended to shock Mary Poppins and Sound of Music fans (and pull Edwards out of a professional slump), but Andrews went on to star in more complex roles that digressed even further from her wholesome persona by ignoring that persona altogether. Victor/Victoria, for example, is an Oscar-winning musical that features the actress as a female performer impersonating a man impersonating a woman, while in Duet for One, she plays a violinist suffering from multiple sclerosis. Although Andrews will always be defined by two of her earliest roles, S.O.B. proved she was game to take on meatier projects and leave her “goody-two-shoes” persona behind.