Five actors who coasted through their entire career on one good performance
Saying an actor has coasted through their entire career on one good performance is a pretty big statement. After all, the craft of acting is a very subjective thing because the best performance in the world to one person may be unwatchable to another, based on their tastes. So, who am I to say what is and isn’t a good performance?
In truth, though, this list isn’t necessarily saying, “This star has only acted well in this one performance.” Instead, the argument is more about an actor receiving plaudits and/or box office success from playing a specific part and then living off the afterglow of that role for decades afterwards.
Within this criteria, the five actors on this countdown have delivered more than one good performance in their careers. In fact, some of them have made a handful of good movies. We’d argue, though, that they’ve never managed to eclipse the role they’ve been dining out on for years. A couple of the stars have even resorted to delivering uninspired variations on their tried and trusted roles.
Here are five actors who coasted through their entire careers on one good performance.
Actors who coasted on one good performance:
Kate Hudson – Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2000)
Kate Hudson’s film career is a strange one. She’s been in some good films, most notably How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, The Killer Inside Me, and Deepwater Horizon, and is never so abjectly awful that she single-handedly sinks a film. However, she’d made an awful lot of mediocre movies, and the period where she was pushed as an A-list rom-com star led to some genuinely dreadful efforts like Bride Wars, Fool’s Gold, and My Best Friend’s Girl.
In truth, in 25+ years as a film actor, Hudson hasn’t come remotely close to delivering a performance as eye-catching and memorable as Penny Lane in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous. That role, as a groupie who follows the fictional rock band Stillwater across the country, was such a star-making turn that it netted Hudson an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ in only her fourth big screen outing.
Can Hudson ever recapture the spirit of Penny Lane and deliver a performance that knocks an audience for six? It’s hard to imagine, as she’s been coasting on that one film for so long. However, one of her upcoming projects is the Netflix show Running Point, which casts Hudson as the new female president of a prominent basketball franchise who has to prove herself in that male-dominated industry. Maybe it will be the performance that finally sees her move past Almost Famous?
Ryan Reynolds – Deadpool (Tim Miller, 2016)
This entry is a little strange because even though Ryan Reynolds didn’t play the classic version of Deadpool that would prove so ludicrously popular until 2016, he has arguably been playing the character for almost his entire 30-year movie career. That’s right – even before he was Deadpool, Reynolds was Deadpool, and after he became Deadpool, he doubled down on being Deadpool. Is that too many uses of the word ‘Deadpool’?
For our money, the birth of Reynolds’ trademark Deadpool character came in 2004’s Blade: Trinity, the first action movie he made. As vampire hunter Hannibal King, he was sarcastic, quippy, incapable of taking anything seriously, and always ready with a creatively foul-mouthed putdown. He was then able to apply a similar energy to comedies and romcoms like The Proposal and The Change-Up, while also trying to recreate the Blade character almost exactly in films like Green Lantern and RIPD. When Deadpool hit in 2016, though, everything clicked into place, and Reynolds hasn’t deviated from that lane for the ensuing eight years.
The most disappointing thing about the fact that Reynolds has spent the vast majority of his career coasting on this one good performance is that he can do a lot more when he puts his mind to it. There was a period where he took chances on projects like Buried, The Nines, and Mississippi Grind, and delivered in all of them. Sadly, though, when he realised most of the world simply wanted him to shoot people and rattle off juvenile variations of the F-word, he stopped attempting anything else.
Mila Kunis – Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010)
Casting an eye over Mila Kunis’ film career reveals one film that stands out like a sore thumb. In a filmography defined by middling comedies like Date Night, Bad Moms, Friends with Benefits, and The Spy Who Dumped Me, Darren Aronofsky’s haunting Black Swan is a huge outlier. In that brilliant psychological nightmare, Kunis held her own against Natalie Portman – who delivered a powerhouse performance – and was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for ‘Best Supporting Actress’. It proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Kunis was a real dramatic talent.
Sadly, Kunis’ career in the years since has struggled to live up to the compelling magnetism she showed in Black Swan. The strength of her performance in the film helped convince filmmakers to cast her in other dramas like Luckiest Girl Alive and Four Good Days, but these movies were nowhere near as impactful as Kunis would have wanted.
Kunis feels like she’s been coasting on the goodwill of Black Swan and her long-running voice role as Meg Griffin in Family Guy for far too long, and that’s a shame. Perhaps being a part of the ensemble cast of Wake Up Dead Man, the third Knives Out movie, will reignite her potential.
Cuba Gooding Jr – Jerry Maguire (Cameron Crowe, 1996)
Before Cuba Gooding Jr’s career was banished to realms of direct-to-DVD obscurity and his personal reputation lay in tatters following a host of sexual assault allegations, it already seemed bizarre that this man won the Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor.’ His breakthrough performance as American football star Rod Tidwell in Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire is undeniably entertaining and a high point of the movie. After all, it did give the world the iconic “Show me the money!” scene, so that’s got to count for something.
However, over the next couple of decades, Gooding Jr’s Oscar win began to look more and more puzzling. He didn’t get anywhere near the sheer charisma of that Jerry Maguire performance in big movies like Pearl Harbour, Men of Honour, and Instinct, and barely half a decade after taking home a Little Gold Man, he was already starring in dreadful films like Rat Race and Snow Dogs.
In truth, any roles Gooding Jr has been hired for since Jerry Maguire are probably still founded on goodwill for that one performance. Hell, even when he was nominated for an Emmy for playing OJ Simpson in American Crime Story: The People v OJ Simpson, there was widespread bafflement, with several articles published by prominent outlets about how bizarre the nomination was.
Vin Diesel – The Fast and the Furious (Rob Cohen, 2001)
The most ironic thing about Vin Diesel coasting off his performance as Dominic Toretto in The Fast and the Furious is this: it wasn’t his original intention. After Rob Cohen’s street-racing action thriller became an unexpected hit in 2001, Diesel was primed for action movie stardom. To his credit, though, he didn’t initially go back to the well. Instead of signing up for 2 Fast 2 Furious, Diesel played extreme sports spy Xander Cage in XXX, also directed by Cohen. He then refused to return for that movie’s sequel, too, as his heart lay with Richard B Riddick, the space badass with surgically enhanced eyes that he played in 2000’s Pitch Black and 2004’s The Chronicles of Riddick.
Unfortunately for Diesel, the Riddick sequel was a damp squib at the box office, as were movies like Babylon AD and Find Me Guilty. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, Diesel returned as Toretto in a cameo in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, and then took up a starring role in the fourth entry Fast & Furious. He’s been a mainstay ever since, playing Toretto with trademark po-faced ultra-seriousness in movies five through ten.
It all begs the question: Did these flops in Diesel’s early career rob the world of a couple of decades’ worth of varied, unique performances across a variety of genres? Probably not. He is what he is, after all. But has the taciturn star been coasting on the love the world has for the family-lovin’, muscle car-racin’, Corona-drinkin’ Toretto for the better part of 20 years? You bet he has.
