32 greatest movies with famous people (before they were famous)
Jun. 20, 2024Some Hollywood A-listers have been in movies even earlier than you remember
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Every Hollywood superstar has to start somewhere. While some actors are lucky enough to knock it out of the park on their first or second try, most languish in obscurity before finally making their big break. But which movies actually star famous peoplebeforethey were famous?
Whether it’s a small part in a big movie or an obscure cult classic, some movies happen to have ultra-famous faces long before they were actually a household name. Due to the notoriously grueling audition process that almost all movies find their actors, even the most famous actors and prestigious awards winners have to get their start somewhere.
Below are 32 great movies that will most certainly make you say, “Theywere inthat?”
32. A Nightmare on Elm Street (with Johnny Depp)
Before Jackie Chan became a martial arts icon, he was just one of many faceless henchmen thrown at the legendary Bruce Lee. In Lee’s one and only Hollywood movie, Enter the Dragon released in 1973, Lee plays a Shaolin master and secret agent tasked with infiltrating a crime lord’s island fortress. Standing in his way are hordes of kung fu killers who try (and fail) to stop Bruce Lee. In retrospective interviews, Chan hilariously recalls when Lee accidentally injured him on set. Enjoying the attention from an apologetic Lee, Chan milked his pain just so they could hug for a bit longer.
Before he was Marvel’s Daredevil, Charlie Cox was just a young man in love. In Matthew Vaughn’s effervescent romantic fantasy Stardust (based on the Neil Gaiman novel), Cox plays a young man named Tristan who tries to woo his crush Victoria (Sienna Miller) by retrieving a fallen star, unaware the star is also a beautiful young woman, Yvaine (Claire Danes). Early in the movie, Tristan gets embarrassed by Victoria’s boyfriend, played by Henry Cavill in a bit part. Honestly, it should surprise nobody that Superman would outshine Daredevil.
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Well before he was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars - and we mean that literally - Dwayne Johnson wrestled in the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) as “The Rock.” In the 1999 documentary Beyond the Mat, Johnson appears as himself as the cameras go deep behind Gorilla position to reveal what the modern wrestling industry really looks like. While the documentary’s narrative primarily focuses on the wrestler Mankind, real name Mick Foley, Foley’s on screen rival at the time was The Rock. One of the movie’s sweetest moments: Foley introducing Dwayne Johnson to his kids, so they aren’t awfully traumatized when he beats up their daddy with a steel chair later that night.
With the 1984 martial arts comedy Drunken Tai Chi (directed by the legendary Yuen Woo-ping), Donnie Yen first transitioned from stuntman to actor; he has since become one of the biggest onscreen action heroes in Asia, plus major Hollywood movie credits like Rogue One and John Wick: Chapter 4. In Drunken Tai Chi, Yen stars as a young man on the run from a killer. He takes up refuge with an eccentric husband and wife, both of them masters of Tai Chi which they teach to Yen to defeat his enemies. Drunken Tai Chi is a rollicking good time that gives audiences a glimpse at a future superstar.
After the success of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, eagle-eyed viewers noticed that a very young Elijah Wood had a bit part in Back to the Future Part II. (He’s the kid who scoffs at Marty McFly’s favorite arcade game.) But in 1998, Elijah Wood had an even meatier role in the cult sci-fi horror movie The Faculty. Set at a suburban high school where the school’s adult staff are secretly predatory aliens, a group of misfit teens unite to stop a sudden alien invasion. Wood plays bullied student Casey, the photographer for the school paper who is pushed around by the school’s head cheerleader Delilah. Jordana Brewster plays Delilah, herself on the cusp of stardom before starring in The Fast and the Furious just a few years later.
In Michael Gottlieb’s playful reimagining of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a ’90s Los Angeles teenager (Thomas Ian Nicholas) is magically flung back in time to medieval England, where he stands in the presence of none other than King Arthur. In supporting roles are pre-fame stars Kate Winslet (years before she boarded the fateful Titanic) and Daniel Craig (a full 11 years before playing James Bond). Winslet and Craig’s characters enjoy a star-crossed romance subplot, one that comes together through the whimsy of a teenager rollerblading through Camelot.
In 1992, Hollywood icon Robert Redford sat behind the camera for A River Runs Through It, a decades-spanning period drama based on Norman Maclean’s semi-autobiographical novel. While the movie is usually remembered for starring Brad Pitt at the start of his initial breakthrough, the movie also features a very young Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a child-age version of Norman Maclean. Two years later, Gordon-Levitt starred in Angels in the Outfield, and a few years after that, earned his stardom in the 1999 teen rom-com 10 Things I Hate About You.
It takes a lot for any actor to hold their own against Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Which is why it’s all the more impressive that a ten-year-old Kirsten Dunst did just that for Neil Jordan’s movie adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. Dunst plays Claudia, a child who is turned into a vampire by the main leads and physically stays a child despite living for many years. In an L.A. Times interview from 1994, producer Stephen Woolley commented: “We needed a child with a mind capable of grasping the fine points of the difficult monologues Claudia has, and Kirsten was the first actress we saw. She gave a wonderful reading but we thought it was too good to be true, so we saw thousands of other girls. In the end we came back to Kirsten–she’s quite extraordinary in the part.”
In 1993, Liv Tyler appeared alongside another yet-to-be discovered actress Alicia Silverstone in the Aerosmith music video “Crazy.” (Tyler is the daughter of Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler.) After her film debut in the 1994 movie Silent Fall, she took center stage in the cult 1995 comedy-drama Empire Records. A coming-of-age tale, the movie follows a group of record store employees whose lives change over the course of one strange day: “Rex Manning Day.” While the movie was a box office bomb, it enjoys cult status and is recognized for launching the careers of many of its stars, most especially Tyler.
Thelma & Louise is often considered the movie that introduced Brad Pitt to the mainstream. But before he wooed Geena Davis as a hunky hitchhiker, he had various roles here and there; he even played a nameless partygoer in Less Than Zero, starring Robert Downey Jr. In 1989, Pitt had his second leading role as a cool, charismatic high school student in the ’80s slasher Cutting Class, about a suburban high school that suffers a rash of murders after a disturbed student returns to its hallways. If you’ve ever wanted to see the guy from Fight Club partake in a quintessential 1980s horror movie, Cutting Class begs your attendance.
The cult film adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s seminal novel, directed by Terry Gilliam, stars Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro as a journalist and attorney on a hallucinogenic journey to Las Vegas, an abstract search for the American Dream following the collapse of the 1960s counterculture movement. For a brief moment in the movie, the two men pick up a twink hitchhiker in a Mickey Mouse t-shirt, played by none other than future Spider-Man star Tobey Maguire. The men’s altered state scare off Maguire, who leaves the backseat of their convertible just a few minutes after riding with them.
In this star-studded crime comedy from Steven Soderbergh, itself based on Elmore Leonard’s 1996 novel, a handsome bank robber (George Clooney) falls in love with smart, sexy Federal Marshal (Jennifer Lopez). While actors like Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, Albert Brooks appear, not to mention Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Keaton in uncredited cameo capacities, a pre-fame Viola Davis briefly shows up playing the wife of Don Cheadle’s character. Davis continued playing small roles in Soderbergh’s other movies, like Traffic and Ocean’s Eleven, before breaking through as an Oscar-winning movie star in her own right.
In this woefully overlooked ’90s action gem from director Steve Wang, Iron Chef’s Mark Dacascos and Kadeem Hardison play two men on a high-octane road trip to deliver a bleeding edge device to Los Angeles while evading Chinese forces. Along the way the two men meet a young woman named Deliverance who runs a dingy motel. Deliverance is played by the late Brittany Murphy, who found stardom just two years earlier with the hit film Clueless. Murphy’s Hollywood fame had its highs and lows, until it came to an unfortunate halt following her death in 2009.
The beloved cult TV show Freaks and Geeks is credited for launching the careers of virtually everyone involved with it, including stars John Francis Daley, James Franco, Martin Starr, Busy Phillips, Samm Levine, and of course, Seth Rogen. But after Freaks and Geeks and before his bigger fame through movies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, Rogen had the minor role of a high school bully in Richard Kelly’s cerebral teen thriller Donnie Darko. In addition to starring Jake Gyllenhaal (who himself enjoyed a career breakthrough with October Sky a few years earlier), Donnie Darko also had Jena Malone as the leading love interest.
At the tender age of 13, Christian Bale held down the lead role of Steven Spielberg’s period epic Empire of the Sun, about a young British boy in a World War II Japanese internment camp. The part earned Bale instant acclaim and recognition, setting him down the path of a Hollywood superstar. He was still considered “unknown” by the producers of the 2000 thriller American Psycho, and was given a meager salary of $50,000 to play a wealthy Wall Street yuppie. The movie catapulted Bale to stardom, with him eventually landing the coveted role of Batman for Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster trilogy.
Though this fourth installment of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series did poorly in theaters, it has earned retrospective praise for the ways it lampoons its own series and meditates on the declining slasher genre. It also demands attention based on the fact it boasts two future Hollywood A-listers: Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger. Zellwegger stars as one of several Texas teenagers whose prom night takes a turn for the worse after they encounter the terror of Leatherface and his family, headed by Vilmer Slaughter (McConaughey).
Well before he was a regular cast member on In Living Color and far before his career breakthrough with Ace Ventura, Jim Carrey was just another struggling actor. Shortly after moving to Los Angeles from Toronto, Carrey was cast in the lead role of the teen horror comedy Once Bitten, playing a high school student who is seduced by a vampire at a Hollywood nightclub. Carrey followed it up with a supporting role in Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married. But it wasn’t until In Loving Color that Carrey’s name started to mean something to everyone else.
Octavia Spencer is a celebrated actress whose work in movies like Fruitvale Station, The Help, Hidden Figures, and The Shape of Water have earned her prestigious recognition; for The Help, she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. But like many in Hollywood, Spencer spent years cutting her teeth in only bit parts, oftentimes as nurses (in movies like The Sky Is Falling, Everything Put Together, and What Planet Are You From?). Her first “big” movie was in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, where Spencer has the unforgettable small part of a cynical “Check-In Girl” at the wrestling event where Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) tests his superpowers. Even as a nameless character, Spencer shines with her iconic delivery of byzantine legalese before saying, “Down the hall to the ramp. May God be with you.”
Anyone who sat through middle school English might remember that Tom Cruise had a supporting role in Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s YA novel The Outsiders. But before that, Cruise played a crucial role in the dramatic thriller Taps, set at a military academy. So the story goes, Cruise impressed director Harold Becker on set that his role as background actor was expanded into that of a disturbed academy student who commits a heinous act of violence. Taps is quite the exhibition of Tom Cruise demonstrating his future stardom.
Eric Francisco is a freelance entertainment journalist and graduate of Rutgers University. If a movie or TV show has superheroes, spaceships, kung fu, or John Cena, he’s your guy to make sense of it. A former senior writer at Inverse, his byline has also appeared at Vulture, The Daily Beast, Observer, and The Mary Sue. You can find him screaming at Devils hockey games or dodging enemy fire in Call of Duty: Warzone.
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