HBO has been the place where television gets taken seriously for close to thirty years now, which means its back catalogue is also an accidental museum of famous people before anyone knew who they were. Every prestige drama needs a bartender, a bully, a one-scene weirdo, a guy who gets shot in the teaser. Somebody has to play those parts, and in the late nineties and early 2000s those somebodies were frequently future movie stars working for scale.
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The fun is not just that these appearances exist. It is that you almost certainly watched them without noticing. Some of these actors are buried under a wig or a decade of aging. One is credited under a name nobody would recognize. A couple deliver maybe six lines total. Every one of them went on to become someone whose face you would now spot from across a stadium. We are skipping Westeros here, for the record. Game of Thrones minted so many stars that it needs a list of its own, and it already has one. These five are hiding somewhere less obvious.
5. Nick Offerman in Deadwood
Two years before Deadwood, Nick Offerman was a Chicago theater guy. Five years after it, he was Ron Swanson. In between, he turned up in the show’s second episode, “Deep Water,” as Tom Mason, a road agent who gets drunk, decides to avenge his brother by shooting Wild Bill Hickok, and is dispatched roughly as competently as that plan suggests.
It is a single episode and he is credited, so this is not exactly a state secret. It is just that nobody watching Deadwood in 2004 had any reason to remember the guy. The scene is also, for the record, the one where Offerman appears fully nude, which recontextualizes a great deal of Parks and Recreation. He eventually made it back to HBO two decades later as Bill in The Last of Us, a performance so good that viewers started lobbying for an Emmy before the credits finished rolling. Not bad for a career that started here getting shot in a saloon.
4. Donald Glover in Girls
In 2013, Donald Glover was the guy from Community. Atlanta was three years away and Lando Calrissian was five. He spent two episodes of Girls Season 2 as Sandy, a Black Republican briefly dating Hannah, and then left the show having detonated it. Their breakup is the best scene in the season, a blistering takedown of Hannah’s self-regard that ends with Sandy mocking her entire worldview back at her: “Oh, I’m a white girl, and I moved to New York and I’m having a great time, and, Oh, I’ve got a fixed-gear bike, and I’m going to date a black guy and we’re going to go to a dangerous part of town.”
Lena Dunham later confirmed to The New Yorker that essentially none of that was scripted. “Every massive insult of white women was one hundred per cent him.” He was improvising. It is the clearest possible preview of the writer who would make Atlanta two years later.
3. Sydney Sweeney in Sharp Objects
Euphoria premiered in 2019 and made Sydney Sweeney a star more or less overnight. The year before that, she was on HBO already, and almost nobody registered it. Long before her appearances in The White Lotus, Madame Web, and The Housemaid, Sweeney gave one of the best performances of her budding career.
In Sharp Objects she plays Alice, Camille’s roommate from the psychiatric facility, appearing in flashbacks and centered in the third episode, “Fix.” It is a small part with an enormous amount of weight on it, since Alice is essentially the emotional hinge for everything Amy Adams’ character is carrying. Sweeney plays it quietly and well, and the part itself is stands in stark contrast to the alluring and lustful performances the actress has become known to take-on. Then the show moved on, and twelve months later she was one of the most recognizable actors of her generation. Rewatching it now is genuinely strange.
2. Bradley Cooper in Sex and the City
Sex and the City was the first thing Bradley Cooper ever did on camera. Not his first big role. His first role, full stop. In Season 2’s “They Shoot Single People, Don’t They?” he plays Jake, a downtown smoker who briefly charms Carrie. It aired in 1999, nine years before The Hangover. And the best part of the story is what went wrong. Cooper could not drive a stick shift, which the part required, so production sent him to driving school. He told an audience at the Santa Barbara Film Festival that he still could not manage it: “I still messed it up, so they had somebody else drive the car and I just had to, pretend that we stopped.”
Director Michael Patrick King has confirmed the rest. Cooper admitted at four in the morning that he could not do it, and the scene was rewritten so Carrie simply climbs out of the car and walks home. An Oscar-nominated director and one of the biggest movie stars alive, and his television debut had to be rewritten around his inability to operate a clutch.
1. Lady Gaga in The Sopranos
Long before she was a pop culture icon and inspiration to an entire generation of “Little Monsters,” Lady Gaga Was 15 years old when she appeared on The Sopranos – credited as Stefani Germanotta. The character was unnamed, identified only as “Girl at Swimming Pool #2.” In the Season 3 episode “The Telltale Moozadell,” A.J. and his friends break into the school and trash the indoor pool. One of the kids smoking on the bleachers, barely lit, gone in seconds, is a teenage Lady Gaga six years before “Just Dance.” Not a cameo. Not a wink. A background part in a school vandalism scene, played by a high schooler nobody had any reason to look at twice. There is no better version of this premise anywhere in HBO’s catalogue. Half the people reading this have seen that episode. Few of them will even recognize her on a rewatch.
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