Movie Makeovers: Film Characters Who Get New Identities

Opening this week, the thriller ‘Self/Less’ is a story about an ailing millionaire who transfers his consciousness into the body of a healthy young man. Here’s a look a few other identity do-overs in the movies. 

In this remake of the 1978 hit ‘Heaven Can Wait,’ star Chris Rock gets hit (literally) with a really big problem — an overzealous angel plucks him from a car wreck before the accident actually happens. The angels devise a “colorful” way to return Rock’s streetwise comic to Earth... reincarnated as a wealthy, old, white business mogul.

Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is one of the world’s top artificial intelligence scientists... that is, until he gets fatally attacked by a rogue band of antitechnology terrorists. The good doctor lives on though — by uploading his consciousness to one of the programs he’s been developing.

When Officer Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) is gunned down in the line of duty, the conglomerate OmniCorp sees a golden opportunity to create the ultimate crime fighter — a police officer who’s part man, part robot. In this remake of the 1987 sci-fi shoot-‘em-up, the greedy suits forgot an important thing when giving Murphy his new cyborg identity: just because someone’s a machine doesn’t mean they can’t be human. 

When you’re a divorced father fighting for custody, you’ll do anything to spend more time with your kids. For actor Daniel Hillard that means taking on the identity of an elderly English nanny so he can be their full-time caregiver. The late Robin Williams was hysterical in the gender-bending role, taking home a Best Actor Golden Globe Award for his work.  

To make his way off the unemployment line, actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) really plays against type... taking on the identity of a woman in order to land a role on a soap opera.  Playing opposite Jessica Lange, Hoffman received a Best Actor Golden Globe Award and Academy Award nomination for his performance.

Based on the like-named comic book series, this sci-fi thriller stars Bruce Willis as an FBI agent policing a society where people live remotely from the safety of their own homes, via robotic surrogates. When murder interrupts the peace of the man-made utopia, Willis sheds the safety of his own data-driven doppelganger to solve the mystery.

In this remake of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1990 film, mild-mannered factory worker Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell) wants to spice up his boring existence, so he heads to Rekall for a “memory implant” of life as a secret agent. Quaid gets more than he bargained for, however, when he realizes he’s been implanted with memories of a life he’s lived before... as somebody other than himself.

When it comes to identity-changing characters, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who’s more of a shape-shifter than the T-1000. Played by Robert Patrick, this ever-changing mass of liquid metal appears as a policeman, a housewife and as an assortment of other seedy suspects in his deadly pursuit of Resistance leader John and his mother, Sarah Connor (Edward Furlong and Linda Hamilton).

Turning in a Golden Globe-nominated performance, Matt Damon stars as Tom Ripley, a bathroom attendant who assumes the identity of a Manhattan socialite in this psychological thriller. When his plans for living the good life begin to unravel, Ripley goes to extreme measures to make sure his true identity is never revealed.