5 Real People Who Got Played By Two Totally Different Actors — And We Can't Stop Comparing Them

Truman Capote Got Two Biopics In One Year — And One Actor Walked Away With The Oscar

Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Best Actor Oscar for playing Truman Capote in 2005's "Capote," and just one year later Toby Jones played the exact same author, during the exact same chapter of his life, in "Infamous." Critics couldn't stop measuring one against the other — some argued Jones was the more accurate physical match, but Hoffman's trophy made the comparison lopsided from the jump.

Steve Jobs Got The Ashton Kutcher Treatment First — Then Michael Fassbender Got The Oscar Nod

Ashton Kutcher played the Apple co-founder in 2013's "Jobs" and got largely panned by critics for it, while Michael Fassbender's turn in Danny Boyle's "Steve Jobs" two years later earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Fassbender even joked at a press conference that he prepared for the role by studying Kutcher's earlier performance. </cite>

Kurt Russell Played Elvis Decades Before Austin Butler — And He Actually Knew The Real Guy

Kurt Russell starred as Elvis Presley in the 1979 TV movie "Elvis," earning an Emmy nomination, more than 40 years before Austin Butler's performance in Baz Luhrmann's "Elvis" landed him a Best Actor Oscar nomination. The wildest part: Russell actually met the real Elvis as a child actor on 1963's "It Happened at the World's Fair," where Presley's character paid young Russell to kick him in the shins.

Abraham Lincoln Fought Vampires And Won An Oscar In The Same Calendar Year

In 2012, Daniel Day-Lewis won his third Best Actor Oscar for playing Lincoln in Spielberg's historical drama, and that same year Benjamin Walker played the exact same president wielding an axe against the undead in "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter." Day-Lewis was literally handed his Oscar by Meryl Streep — who happens to be Walker's mother-in-law.

J. Edgar Hoover Got The Full DiCaprio Biopic Treatment — But Billy Crudup Played Him First

Leonardo DiCaprio took on the title role in Clint Eastwood's 2011 biopic "J. Edgar," delivering what Roger Ebert called a performance that was "fully-realized, subtle and persuasive" even though the film itself split critics. Two years earlier, Billy Crudup played a younger Hoover butting heads with Congress in Michael Mann's "Public Enemies," a much smaller supporting role that still got singled out by Variety as "disarmingly good."