Actors can be thought of as doing one thing, some actors have a whole career playing particular types of roles, often giving superb performances in these roles. But sometimes stereotyped actors break out of their confines, do something radically different and it works.
Comedians Being Serious – Jim Carrey

At this point, Jim Carrey has starred in a number of genuinely brilliant films where he gave amazing performances that stretched his range, whether that be comedic, dramatic or a mix of both. The two that particularly stand out to me are Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (for which everyone involved should have gotten an Oscar from the director to the fake dead bird) and The Truman Show. This was made in 1998 and followed a string of commercial successes in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber. The Jim Carrey from these films was an almost uncontrollable ball of energy, twisting his face into weird permutations, being incredibly loud and behaving ridiculously. Jim Carrey’s career trajectory would have been to star in more wacky comedies until people got bored. Instead, Carrey did something very different – he starred in The Truman Show. Truman is a quiet, sensitive and kind man, put upon by various pressures in his life, yearning after a lost love he cannot understand. The only moments of manic Carrey come in what are played as distressing and upsetting moments, not comedy. It is a revelatory performance.
Franchises

For this, we have the child stars of Daniel Radcliffe, Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart. Radcliffe as Harry Potter, Pattinson and Stewart as Edward and Bella in the Twilight series. They spent years at the beginning of their careers playing one character, often in films that were not well-received outside the fanbase. Stewart and Pattinson in particular have been on a mission to break the stereotype of franchise star to serious actor. One of Stewart’s first films after this franchise was Camp X-Ray, where she played a soldier based at Guantanamo Bay. The same year the final Twilight film was released Pattinson was in Cosmopolis, a David Cronenberg film, which is enough of a description to know that it would be a very different film to Twilight. Radcliffe seems to have gone down the route of not doing as much but just whatever interests him; popping up in odd roles like Swiss Army Man or Guns Akimbo, starring in the not-as-well-known-as-it-should-be Weird: the Al Yankovic Story.
Romantic Comedies

Few people are having a better third act of their career than Hugh Grant. Grant rose to fame in Four Weddings and a Funeral and then spent years starring in romantic comedies about befuddled Englishmen. At some point though something seems to have snapped in Grant leading him to take very different roles. In Paddington 2 (which let’s not forget is a contender for the greatest film ever made) he plays a thieving cad, in Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves he also plays a thieving cad, in the recently released Heretic he is neither a rom-com lead or thieving cad but is quietly terrifying in the trailer of this horror movie.
Sandra Bullock was one of the most well-known actors in the world and this was for mainly appearing in rom-coms. She starred in, amongst others, While You Were Sleeping, Hope Floats, Two Weeks Notice, and The Lake House. In fairness some of these rom-coms have a surprising amount going on in terms in plot – so The Lake House features time travel letter writing and While You Were Sleeping through a convoluted turn of events Bullock pretends to be the fiancé of a man in a coma. IMDb lists her nicknames as America’s Sweetheart and The Girl Next Door. And then she won an Oscar for The Blind Side. Sandra Bullock was always a very good actor but after The Proposal it didn’t seem likely she would soon win an Oscar. Bullock went on to make Gravity essentially being without any other actors, let alone romantic interests for the whole film.
Nice British People

It is hard to think of a more complete transformation than Hugh Laurie playing Prince George in Blackadder to Hugh Laurie in House. Along with Stephen Fry, Laurie had cultivated an impeccably English idiot comedy persona, a meticulous work of cultural understanding of being English. And then he played Gregory House a doctor so mean and unpleasant they really shouldn’t have let him be a doctor anymore. Matthew Macfadyen was another nice British actor – he played Mr. Darcy for God’s sake – who then went over to Hollywood and played Tom Wambsgans in Succession a cruel bullying obnoxious caricature of a person who’s saving grace is only that he never personally murdered someone. Then Olivia Colman who for twenty or so years was an excellent sitcom actor, Peep Show, 2012, Rev and so on, and it’s not to say her acting isn’t brilliant in Peep Show but she is now working on a different scale.
Also Read: 1994: The Year of Jim Carrey