3. Pulp Fiction (1994)
Actor(s) that got typecast: Samuel L. Jackson
Typecast? Samuel L. Jackson? No way, m***erf***er.
Samuel L. Jackson’s career has been so successful that it’s difficult to think of him as anything other than a monologuing badass, but once, he was just a normal guy. In fact, his entire image of badassery ultimately stems from his iconic turn in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, where he played the thoughtful, soulful, subtly terrifying, and effortlessly cool Jules Winnfield. In the years that followed, Jackson was so often cast in roles that channeled some element of Jules’ awesomeness that eventually, we stopped noticing and just figured it was part of who the actor was in real life.
Though Pulp Fiction is the film that spawned a thousand crazy fan theories, it also marked the birth of some of the best typecasting in the history of cinema. Without his role in Pulp Fiction, Jackson may never have come to be the go-to onscreen badass in The Negotiator, Star Wars, Shaft, and the MCU. In truth, Samuel L. Jackson always had the capacity for that much cool, but once Tarantino opened the floodgates, there was no getting his badassery back in the bottle.