Usually, when a celebrity appears onscreen for a minute during a movie, you’re supposed to notice. Think about Stan Lee appearing in every Marvel movie for well over a decade; spotting him became a game for fans. Sticking with Marvel, what about the scene in Thor: Ragnarok where Thor, Loki, and Odin are played by Luke Hemsworth, Matt Damon, and Sam Neill, subbing in briefly for Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, and Anthony Hopkins? You’re supposed to see that and go, “Ha!”
But there are other celebrity cameos that fly under the radar, cameos where the point is that they’re hard to spot. Maybe it’s an in-joke between the director and the actor, maybe it’s a prank on the audience, or maybe it’s just a fun extra. Whatever the reason, you could watch these movies dozens of times and never realize who you’re looking at.
Daniel Craig as a Stormtrooper in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)
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Daniel Craig filmed a bit part as a Stormtrooper (designation FN-1824, FYI) in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. An imprisoned Rey (Daisy Ridley) uses Jedi mind tricks on him, and despite some initial resistance, he proves very vulnerable.
Craig was filming the James Bond movie Spectre nearby and decided to ask for a part in the first Star Wars movie made since 2005’s Revenge of the Sith. He thought he’d just appear in the background, but ended up playing out a whole scene opposite the main character, complete with lines.
Craig is one of a great many celebrities to discreetly play Stormtroopers over the years. Other faces beneath the mask include Ed Sheeran, Tom Hardy, Karl Urban, Kevin Smith, and Princes Harry and William. Almost none of them got the screen time of FN-1824, though.
Brad Pitt in Deadpool 2 (2018)
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At one point in Deadpool 2, Deadpool puts together a team of elite superheroes only for nearly all of them to die moments after parachuting into their first mission. One of the dead is Vanisher, who can turn invisible. We see him only very briefly, right as he hits a power line and gets electrocuted to death, and lo and behold: he’s played by famed movie star Brad Pitt. Go to 1:35 in the video above to see him in action.
Of all the cameos on this list, this is the least hidden, because Pitt does actually appear for all of two seconds. That might be just long enough for people to register that someone familiar just died horribly, but not long enough to realize who.
Peter Jackson and Cate Blanchett in Hot Fuzz (2007)
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Hot Fuzz is a 2007 action comedy about a high-performing English police officer named Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) who is so much better at his job than his colleagues that they get him reassigned to a sleepy rural town. Along the way, he encounters a couple of celebrities you didn’t notice were there, including The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, dressed as a demented Santa Claus, who stabs Angel through the hand.
And Jackson’s appearance actually isn’t the biggest celebrity cameo in the film.
And introducing Cate Blanchett’s eyes as Janine
Cate Blanchett stopped by the set of Hot Fuzz to play Angel’s girlfriend, Janine; the couple break up at a crime scene where Janine is doing her job as a forensic investigator. The gag is that Blanchett is wearing a mask, goggles, and a hood the whole time, so you can only tell it’s her if you’ve spent an inordinate amount of time staring into Cate Blanchett’s eyes.
This reminds me of the Brad Pitt cameo in Deadpool 2: get a major actor and then feature them in your movie in a way most people won’t even realize they’re there. It’s funny both times.
Also, I note that Cate Blanchett is also a Lord of the Rings veteran, having played Galadriel. It’s probably just a coincidence that she and Peter Jackson made cameos in the same movie, but I like to think it’s kismet.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the clock in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)
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Joseph Gordon-Levitt and director Rian Johnson have been working together since the days of Brick and Looper, where Gordon-Levitt was front and center. Since then, Gordon-Levitt has had tiny roles in every movie that Johnson has directed. In The Last Jedi, he voices the alien Slowen Lo, a resident of the casino city Canto Bight; Slowen Lo tips off the local police that our heroes have parked on the beach and then exits the Star Wars universe forever. In the first Knives Out movie, Gordon-Levitt voices a hard-boiled detective in a TV drama that a character is watching.
Gordon has his most esoteric cameo yet in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, about a tech billionaire who invites his friends to his private island for a murder-mystery game that turns into an actual murder. A huge clock bangs out an “hourly dong” every 60 minutes. Joseph Gordon-Levitt said the word “dong,” and then his voice was altered to make it sound like it was coming from a giant clock.
Cameos don’t get much more obscure than that. A third Knives Out movie is coming out in theaters (although not nearly enough of them) in November, and Gordon-Levitt will surely have a cameo there as well. Keep your ears and eyes peeled, because he could pop up anywhere.
John Wayne as Garindan ezz Zavor in the original Star Wars (1977)
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We started with Star Wars, and we’ll end with Star Wars. In the original 1977 movie, an alien character named Garindan ezz Zavor rats out Luke Skywalker and Han Solo’s location to a bunch of Stormtroopers. Garindan talks with a series of buzzes and whizzes that sound designer Ben Burtt engineered from discarded movie lines he found around the studio. It was only much later that he realized the original lines were spoken by legendary actor John Wayne, who died a couple of years after Star Wars premiered, without ever realizing he was technically in it. It’s considered his final role.
The Wayne family’s association with Star Wars continues to this day, as John Wayne’s grandson, Brendan Wayne, appears in The Mandalorian. While Pedro Pascal plays the title character, it’s often Brendan Wayne who’s actually underneath his helmet and armor. Whether this affects your watch order on your next Star Wars binge is up to you.
Cameos are mostly harmless fun
Cameos like this can add rewatch value to a film, turning it into a movie that’s even more fun to watch a second time when you know what to look for. Or they can pass by completely unnoticed. On rare occasions, you may be the first person to notice an obscure cameo and get bragging rights with your cinephile friends. Cameos don’t make the movie, but they can add a little spice.
