Most actors move on from a role once the sequel money dries up. A few stay with one character for decades, and the role ends up aging alongside them.
The seven actors below all returned to the same character across a span of more than twenty years. I picked them by checking release dates of the first and most recent appearances, so each span comes from the films and shows themselves.
Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones
Ford first cracked the whip in Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981. He came back for the 1984, 1989 and 2008 sequels. His final outing, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, arrived in 2023.
That makes a gap of about 42 years between the first and last film. The last chapter openly deals with an older, wearier Indy, which suits an actor who was in his eighties by then.
Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker
Hamill debuted as Luke in Star Wars in 1977. He appeared in the original trilogy, returned in The Force Awakens in 2015, and starred in The Last Jedi in 2017. He closed out the main saga with a role in The Rise of Skywalker in 2019.
Luke also turned up, de-aged, in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. That stretches the character’s screen life across more than four decades. Few film roles have lasted that long.
Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode
Curtis made her film debut as Laurie Strode in John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1978. She returned for several sequels over the years, including Halloween H20 in 1998 and Halloween: Resurrection in 2002. She picked the role up again in the 2018 Halloween, then in Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends.
Halloween Ends came out in 2022, which put 44 years between her first and last turn. Laurie began as a babysitter and ended up as a survivor shaped by decades of trauma. That arc is much of why the role has lasted.
Hugh Jackman as Wolverine
Jackman first played Wolverine in X-Men in 2000. He went on to star in multiple X-Men films and in the solo movies The Wolverine and Logan. Logan, released in 2017, was widely presented as his farewell to the character.
He returned anyway in Deadpool & Wolverine in 2024. That brought his run to about 24 years, a long stretch for a physically demanding superhero role.
Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt
Cruise first played IMF agent Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible in 1996. The series has continued for decades, with Cruise doing many of his own stunts. The latest film, Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning, was released in May 2025.
That is a span of roughly 29 years in the role. Cruise also revisited Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, 36 years after the original. Ethan Hunt is still the more continuous of his two long-running characters.
Kelsey Grammer as Frasier Crane
Grammer first played Dr. Frasier Crane on the sitcom Cheers, which began in 1982, with the character arriving in 1984. He then led the spinoff Frasier from 1993 to 2004. A revival of Frasier premiered in 2023 and ran for two seasons.
Counting from his first appearance in 1984, that is about four decades with one character. It’s one of television’s longest runs for a single role, and few sitcom characters have been revisited this many times.
Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa
Stallone wrote and starred in Rocky in 1976. He played the boxer in five more films, including Rocky Balboa in 2006. He returned to the character for a supporting role in Creed in 2015 and again in Creed II in 2018.
That puts the span at about 42 years. The role shifted from underdog fighter to elder mentor, which let Stallone keep the character fresh as he aged.
Playing one role for twenty years or more takes a particular kind of luck. The franchise has to survive, the audience has to keep caring, and the actor has to be willing to return. For these seven, it happened. Their characters have become part of their own personal histories, not just job credits.
