Steven Spielberg is one of the best directors ever. He’s been making incredible movies since the ’70s, when Jaws changed the summer movie season and became the first summer blockbuster ever. The director has done films in almost every genre, from sci-fi to thrillers, animated movies, comedy, adventure, or drama, being nominated for 22 Academy Awards (10 as director) and winning three, including two for Best Director for Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan.
As with every director, he has some repeated collaborators with whom he works again and again; people like composer John Williams or cinematographer Janusz Kaminsky. The same has happened with actors, as the director loves to keep working with some of them as much as he can. Some are movie stars, but others are surprising supporting players that add more color and character to his films. Here are the 10 actors who have been in the most Steven Spielberg movies.
10 Daniel Craig – 2 Appearances
For most, Daniel Craig will always be James Bond, but before he had license to kill, the actor worked with Spielberg in the polarizing Munich. His role as Steve was one of the first steps that proved he could be a tough killer, and that movie and Layer Cake were the reasons the producers thought of him as the new 007. Craig even asked Spielberg for advice if he should take the role, and the director was more than enthusiastic about it. Years later, they worked together again in The Adventures of Tintin, where the actor voiced the villain Sakharine.
9 Tom Cruise – 2 Appearances
For a moment in the early 2000s, it looked like Tom Cruise would become the biggest collaborator in Spielberg’s career, as they worked together twice in the span of three years. This was when Cruise was already in his movie star phase, but before he became an almost stuntman, as the characters he played for the director had more layers, and made Cruise a worried father and family man.
Their first collaboration together was in Minority Report, where his character is accused of a future crime he didn’t commit, while also being a drug addict and feeling responsible for his son’s disappearance. There’s a lot of meat on that bone, which made the actor use more acting skills than usual. It looked like both the actor and director loved the experience because they repeated it in War of the Worlds, where Cruise again plays a reluctant hero more worried about his family.
8 Geno Silva – 3 Appearances
Geno Silva (second from the left in the picture) is still most known for his role as a silent hitman in Scarface, but before that, he had already been part of Steven Spielberg’s repertoire of actors. They first worked together in one of Spielberg’s biggest failures in his incredible career, the World War II comedy 1941, where he played Martinez. He also had two other small roles in movies made by the director, as he appeared in the two 1997 films Spielberg directed that year; The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and Amistad.
7 Mark Ivanir – 3 Appearances
Although most people might recognize him for playing some kind of Russian bad guy in their favorite TV show, Mark Ivanir (in the center of the picture) has also appeared in three Steven Spielberg films. His first collaboration together might still be their best, as Ivanir played Marcel Goldberg, an opportunist, who becomes a police officer for the Nazis, because it pays well and keeps him near power. Ivanir also played a cab driver in The Terminal, and voiced many characters in The Adventures of Tintin.
6 Mark Rylance – 3 Appearances
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In the last decade, Mark Rylance might have become one of the first numbers Spielberg calls when he has a new project, as they’ve worked together three times in three years. He’s one of the best-supporting characters in Hollywood, and the director has used those abilities like no one before, as their collaboration in Bridge of Spies, their first together, earned the actor his first and only Academy Award win, as the best supporting actor of that year. After that film, Rylance worked again with the director when he voiced BFG in The BFG, and then played Halliday, the creator of the whole game, in Ready Player One.
5 Richard Dreyfuss – 3 Appearances
Richard Dreyfuss was one of the most sought-after actors in the ’70s and ’80s, when movie stars were not required to physically look like superheroes. The actor was one of Spielberg’s leading men when they worked together in Jaws, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and more than a decade later, they reunited in Always, where he, once again, played the lead role, becoming one of Spielberg’s better alter egos in the first two decades of the director’s career.
About being part of Jaws,Dreyfuss told The Pitch: “I’ve always referred to Jaws as a sort of improvised epic. With Steven in a very, very unmistakably secure, strong lead, we started that film without a script, without a shark, and literally without a cast because I wasn’t cast until the principal photography was started. So, we were all in on it and participated, from the producer Dick Zanuck on down.”
4 Sasha Spielberg – 4 Appearances
Sasha Spielberg is an actress and musician (her stage name is Buzzy Lee), and Steven Spielberg’s daughter, who has appeared in four of his films, playing small parts. Her roles are more blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameos than full characters, since their first collaboration together in The Terminal, where she played Lucy, a girl with a suitcase that Viktor (Tom Hanks) tries to help. Since then, they collaborated in Munich, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and nine years later, inThe Post.
3 Harrison Ford – 4 Appearances
Harrison Ford needs no presentation; he’s Han Solo, Indiana Jones, and Dr. Richard Kimball. It’s in the archeologist franchise where Spielberg and Ford have worked together, as the director was who made him Indiana Jones, and directed him in the first four installments of the franchise. The actor could be even higher on this list if Spielberg had directed Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, but that one was made by James Mangold.
Three of their four films together are absolute bangers, so it’s a shame the director and actor didn’t find more projects to work together on, as they made a great team. Or at least more projects where Ford wasn’t cut off the film, as rumor has it, the actor had a small role in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (which was written by his then-girlfriend, Melissa Mathison), as the principal in Elliot’s (Henry Thomas) school, but the scene didn’t make the final cut.
2 Martin Dew – 5 Appearances
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Martin Dew (with the mustache in the picture) isn’t a movie star. For many, he isn’t even a typical supporting character. Spielberg thinks differently, as he has employed Dew in five films, using his uniqueness to make characters that were nothing on the page into interesting, singular members of the world in which the story is told. Their love story started when Dew played an uncredited looter at a diner in War of the Worlds, and since then, his unique presence has been used by the director as a Russian scientist in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a small role in War Horse, a member of the House of Representatives in Lincoln, and as a CIA agent in Bridge of Spies. Dew is also a usual collaborator for Paul Thomas Anderson, so big directors know him and value him and his talents.
1 Tom Hanks – 5 Appearances
Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg have been collaborating for decades now, not only as director and actor, but also as producing partners (one of their first producing projects together was the great miniseries, Band of Brothers). Even then, it’s when they collaborate in what they both do best, that they shine, as Spielberg has directed Hanks in some of his best movies.
Their first collaboration was in 1999’s Saving Private Ryan, where Hanks played the moral center of the film, Captain John Miller, who is leading a group of soldiers trying to find Private Ryan (Matt Damon). Since then, they’ve collaborated four more times; Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal, Bridge of Spies,and The Post. Spielberg knows how to use Hanks’ everyman qualities and make him one of the most important parts in every film in which they work together.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
