Brendan Fraser and Others: Top 10 Most Impressive Acting Comebacks –

Everybody loves a comeback, and this past year we were lucky enough to have witnessed not one, but two Hollywood comebacks from beloved performers. The Hollywood comeback isn’t new though. As long as there have been films there have been stars who have come and gone. But every once in a while, a star that went away bursts back onto the scene to thunderous applause. Here are ten incredible acting comebacks.

 

10. Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler

In the early 1980s, Mickey Rourke was a critical darling. Turning in acclaimed performances in hit films like Diner & Barfly, made Rourke a hot commodity. Unfortunately, he got in his own way. Poor on-set behavior and some box office bombs led to him going from a rising star to a fallen one by the late 80s.

In 1991, Rourke left acting in favor of a boxing career. Once he came back to Hollywood he had steady work throughout the late 90s and early 2000s with supporting roles in smaller films and straight-to-DVD fare. His role in Robert Rodriguez’s 2005 film Sin City finally brought Rourke back to mainstream attention, but it was three years later that his comeback was solidified.

In Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, Rourke plays Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a former wrestling star trying to make a comeback after his professional and personal lives were in the gutter. The parallels between Randy’s life and Mickey’s no doubt helped Rourke deliver such a beautiful performance.

Rourke imbues Randy with sadness, regret, and hope. He’s a man who wants to do better and wishes he did better. It’s easy to root for him even when he continues to not be able to move on from the business he loves so much. His portrayal struck a chord with audiences and wrestlers alike. The role scored Rourke an Oscar nomination, leading to more roles in high-profile films like Iron Man 2.

 

9. Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club

Matthew McConaughey never really went away, but his career desperately needed to come back from rom-com hell. While the 90s saw him in more varied roles, the 2000s for McConaughey were marked predominantly by middling romantic comedies. His career had reached a stalemate.

After a two-year break from acting, McConaughey started on his journey to reinvent his career by taking more dramatic roles in smaller movies to stretch his muscles as an actor and show off his range. Starting in 2011 with films like The Lincoln Lawyer and Killer Joe, this period is now known as the ‘McConaissance’.

The apex of his comeback came in 2013 with his Oscar-winning role in Dallas Buyers Club. Portraying Ron Woodroof, a real-life AIDS patient who smuggled unapproved drugs into Texas when he found they helped his symptoms. It’s a performance marked not just by his incredible physical transformation but by the compassion and fearlessness he affords the character. McConaughey portrays Woodroof as a man desperate for more time but never a victim, he wants respect, not pity.

Following Dallas Buyers Club, McConaughey continued his career resurgence with roles in The Wolf of Wall Street, Interstellar, True Detective, and Kubo and the Two Strings.

 

8. Keanu Reeves in John Wick

Bursting onto the scene in the late 80s, Keanu Reeves became a star with Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and solidified himself as a staple of the 90s. Films like Point Break, Speed, and The Matrix cemented him as an action star while roles in more dramatic fare like Bram Stroker’s Dracula, The Devil’s Advocate, and Much Ado About Nothing allowed him to flex his acting chops.

By the mid-2000s and the end of The Matrix trilogy, the hits started to dry up for Reeves. While he still had some well-received roles in films like A Scanner Darkly, by the 2010s he was most recognizable for the Sad Keanu memes.

Reeves’ career rebounded in 2014 with the sleeper hit John Wick, an action film directed by his stuntmen in The Matrix films. Following the titular John Wick, a retired hitman on a quest for revenge after the murder of his new puppy and theft of his dog, the film brought Reeves back into the limelight.

With its breakneck gun-fu action in which Reeves performed his own stunts, the film is now regarded as one of the best action movies ever. Reeves is immensely cool in the film but it also still offers moments that showcase his acting ability as he bottles his grief and rage. Not only did the film thrust him back into A-list status but his comeback made him one of the most well-liked celebrities in the world.

 

7. Brendan Fraser in The Whale

One of the most frequently asked questions of the 2010s was, “What happened to Brendan Fraser?”. It speaks to his popularity that when he went away, we all wanted him back. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Brendan Fraser was in many audience favorites like George of the Jungle, Bedazzled, Looney Tunes Back in Action, and The Mummy. He was the quintessential movie star, good-looking, funny, and cool.

Then, by the 2010s he had vanished from the mainstream spotlight. In a 2018 interview with GQ, Fraser explained why. His body had been broken down from performing many of his stunts in The Mummy films which required years worth of surgeries. In that same interview, he detailed how he was also sexually assaulted by the former President of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Phillip Berk. The trauma of that incident made Fraser withdraw from the industry, and as he says in the interview he also believes asking Berk for an apology led to offers drying up.

But Fraser has been quietly mounting a comeback for the last few years. He appeared on the hit show The Affair, had a starring role on FX’s series Trust and a starring role on DC’s Doom Patrol. He has been working his way back into the limelight but with 2022’s The Whale he’s finally a movie star again and the world is happy to have him back.

In The Whale, Fraser plays Charlie, a morbidly obese man who wants to use what little time he has left to reconnect with his estranged daughter. While reactions to the film itself have been mixed, Fraser has been unanimously praised for portraying Charlie with empathy and tenderness. He’s nominated for an Oscar for the role and will follow it up with a role in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower moon.

 

6. Ke Huy Quan in Everything Everywhere All at Once

Much like Fraser, Ke Huy Quan is an actor who disappeared with people wanting to know where he went. Bursting onto the scene as a child actor playing Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Ke followed that role with Data in The Goonies. Then he mostly disappeared. He had some small roles, including one alongside Brendan Fraser in Encino Man but he wasn’t really on our screens anymore.

Sadly, the reason he left acting was that there simply weren’t opportunities for him as an Asian man to get roles. So he abandoned acting, went to film school, and started working behind the scenes. Luckily, while casting for their film Everything Everywhere All At Once, directing pair The Daniels also wanted to know what happened to Ke and so they sent him an offer and that’s how he came bursting back into the mainstream with the 2022 release of the film.

We should be thankful that he did come back because his performance in the film is outstanding. It’s hard to watch the film and not be sad thinking about how many fantastic performances he could have been giving for decades. The system had failed him and almost lost out completely on such a great talent.

As Waymond Wang, husband to Michelle Yeoh’s protagonist Evelyn, Ke is the heart and soul of the film. It’s his character that embodies the central theme of the film to be kind and have empathy for one another. Without his outstanding performance, the whole thing would fall apart. He has such a sense of likable earnestness that it’s impossible not to heed his message. The role has landed Ke an Oscar nomination and he’ll next be seen in Season 2 of Loki and hopefully many more things to come.

 

5. Marlon Brando in The Godfather

Regarded as one of the greatest actors of all time, it’s hard to believe that Marlon Brando ever needed a comeback, but he did. One of the bankable and critically acclaimed stars of the 1950s, Brando cemented his status as a legend with performances in films like On the Water Front, Guys and Dolls, and A Streetcar Named Desire.

The 60s were not good for his career. It was a period marked by box office failures and performances with less than stellar reception. Films like Bedtime Story and Candy did his career no favors and by the end of the decade he was considered unbankable. Then along came The Godfather.

Widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time, Brando’s role as Don Vito Corleone won him his second Oscar for Best Actor and revitalized his status as one of the greatest actors in the world. His performance is extraordinarily nuanced, playing Don Vito with a quiet rage. He’s an intimidating Mafia boss and a soft family man simultaneously. He commands respect through his body language alone.

Brando followed up The Godfather with acclaimed roles in Apocalypse Now, Last Tango in Paris, and Superman. His career took another downturn after that but he was able to give a couple more great performances before his death in 2004.

 

4. Michael Keaton in Birdman

Micheal Keaton is Batman. He will always be Batman and is one of the few actors who can make that claim. Before he was Batman though, he was a comic lead starring in films like Night Shift, Johnny Dangerously, and Beetlejuice. He was already a star, but it was Batman that shot him to superstardom.

Keaton left the role of Batman when director Tim Burton left but he was still working throughout the 90s. While he continued to get work throughout the 2000s, including notable roles in Cars, Toy Story 3, and The Other Guys, most of Keaton’s work came from smaller less successful fare than his earlier work.

In 2014, Birdman gave Michael Keaton a career resurgence with the best role he’s ever had. Portraying Riggan Thompson, a washed-up actor who once played the superhero Birdman and is looking to make his comeback on Broadway, Keaton showed everyone why he was a star to begin with. No doubt drawing on his own experiences, Keaton’s performance balances his comedic strengths and dramatic ones beautifully. It’s a performance of oddball, seething satire, and regretful introspection.

Keaton was nominated for an Oscar for Birdman and has since had major roles in films like Spider-Man: Homecoming, The Founder, and The Trial of the Chicago 7. He’s set to reprise his role as Batman in DC’s The Flash.

 

3. John Travolta in Pulp Fiction

Starting on the hit sitcom Welcome Back Kotter, John Travolta became a superstar in the late 70s off the back of mega hits Grease and Saturday Night Fever. But a series of box-office and critical duds in the 80s had Travolta’s star waning. Enter Quentin Tarantino.

While Travolta finally had some box office success with the Look Who’s Talking films, it was not until Pulp Fiction that his career was revitalized. The against-type character of hitman Vincent Vega allowed Travolta to showcase everything that made him a star in the first place.

Travolta makes playing Vega look effortless. He’s cool, suave, and a little bit goofy. We only see Vega in the context of the events happening to him in the film but Travolta imbues every action with a character history we’ll never see. Whether it’s the way he sifts through a book in the bathroom of the man he’s trying to kill or dancing with Mia at the diner. Everything Travolta does gives us a sense of exactly who this man is even when the film itself doesn’t give us much more than the plot demands.

Travolta received an Oscar nomination for Pulp Fiction and he’s been working steadily ever since. He followed up Pulp Fiction with huge hits like Face/Off and Get Shorty solidifying his status as an A-List star.

 

2. Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story

Like Brando, it’s hard to imagine a screen legend like Katharine Hepburn ever needing a career comeback. In the early to mid-30s she wasn’t just a rising star, she was one of the best actresses around. With two Oscar nominations and one win to her name, everything was going great for the Hollywood icon.

Unfortunately, the second half of the decade was marred by a string of failures. Even Bringing Up Baby, a film now deemed a classic, was a box office failure. She had become box office poison and what was once a thriving career was now in jeopardy. Not content with that label, Hepburn took her career into her own hands.

She took two years off from film acting to star in a play, The Philadelphia Story, a screwball romantic comedy about a woman being visited by her ex-husband on the eve of her second wedding. She also bought the film rights to the play. It was a massive success and she was able to negotiate a deal with MGM to adapt it to a film with her starring.

Co-starring Cary Grant and James Stewart, the film was a box-office hit and critically acclaimed. For her role, Hepburn was nominated for her third Academy Award. Her performance is hilarious and sympathetic, allowing audiences to laugh at her and feel for her plight in equal measure. It’s that winning combination that won over the audiences who had just a few years earlier rejected her.

After The Philadelphia Story, Hepburn’s career continued for decades, cementing herself as one of the most legendary Hollywood stars of all time. By the end of her career, she had received 12 Oscar nominations and four victories. None of that may have ever happened if not for The Philadelphia Story.

 

1. Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man

Robert Downey Jr. made his name as an unofficial member of the famous ‘Brat Pack’, appearing with members in films such as Less than Zero and Weird Science. But as his stock in Hollywood rose, so did his demons.

His substance abuse problems led him to become a liability. Going through multiple stints in both rehab and jail, he was a problem that producers did not want to deal with. Downey’s lowest point came in 2001 when his latest arrest caused him to be fired from Ally McBeal. His role on the show was a fan favorite and garnered him an Emmy nomination but his drug abuse got in the way.

After he finally got clean, Downey Jr. started his comeback with roles in films like A Scanner Darkly, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and Zodiac, but it was with 2008’s Iron Man that he was finally back. It was a role the studio didn’t want him for, but director Jon Favreau fought to get Downey Jr. cast, and thank goodness he did.

As billionaire Tony Stark, Robert Downey Jr. did more than just win audiences over, he started the MCU on its path to cultural domination. Stark is a smart-ass and thanks to RDJ’s immense charisma, he’s a charming one instead of an irritating one. It’s not fun and quips though as his dramatic talent is also on full display as Stark goes through the trauma of captivity and changes from selfish weapons dealer to selfless hero. Thanks to Tony Stark, Robert Downey Jr. is now one of the most profitable and popular stars in Hollywood.

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