Matt Damon may have once started out as a serious thespian with small parts in films like Courage Under Fire and The Rainmaker, but he really didn’t make a name for himself until 1997’s Good Will Hunting, for which he also won an Oscar for screenwriting. There the blond-mopped young man played deep, pensive, and somewhat brooding characters, so it’s a far cry to see him years later donning prosthetic noses and busy mustaches in order to get some added laughs for quirky, somewhat socially awkward characters. But Damon, in movies like the Ocean’s Eleven series and now The Informant has proven himself to be quite the chameleon and has thus garnered a whole new audience and demographic from it, making him truly a winner.

And Damon is in great company. Here are a few more who made names for themselves as dramatic actors but turned surprisingly successful as comedians – and of course those who did not.

You don’t get more serious of a performer than Johnny Depp. The man is so serious about his craft that he moved his family out of the Hollywood scene – so far out he’s across oceans and continents – in order to avoid getting swept up in any superficial aspects of the “fame machine.” Though it can be argued that some of Depp’s early work (Edward Scissorhands, for example) was comedic in nature, those weren’t the roles that truly made him a powerhouse. So when he turned up as Jack Sparrow in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean series, it was something of a shock to see him all done up in heavy eyeliner, swaying confidence and casualness, and cracking dry jokes. But he never failed to elicit laughs, and that’s the mark of a truly great actor: he can be successful in any genre to which he really asserts himself.

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