Where you first saw actor Ethan Suplee in the mid-1990s will depend a lot on how old you were at the time. If you were on the younger side, you were introduced to him in his recurring role as Frankie the Enforcer on “Boy Meets World.” If you were older — or at least, your tastes were — then you likely first took notice of Suplee in his small but memorable roles in Kevin Smith movies “Mallrats” and “Chasing Amy.” Either way, he was almost immediately a steady fixture in film and television and has been ever since.

After Suplee wrapped his four seasons as Randy on “My Name is Earl” — co-starring with fellow frequent Kevin Smith collaborator Jason Lee — he decided to start focusing more on his health. He spent nearly two years riding bikes with the investment of a full-time job, spending upwards of 48 hours a week on two wheels. At his heaviest, Suplee had weighed 530 pounds, but his cycling had trimmed him down to only 9% body fat. 

Eventually, he started to lift weights and add muscle to his newly-thin frame. As Suplee told Entertainment Weekly, he had so completely transformed himself physically that when he started going out for roles with his new look, “[he] found that people were like, ‘Who are you? We don’t know you. You’re this new person.'”

Few adult actors can hold their own in a scene with Jim Carrey when he’s going full Jim Carrey — in fact, some have even refused roles in Carrey’s movies. So for Taylor Momsen to have matched an especially over-the-top Carrey at only seven years old, as Cindy Lou Who in 2000’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” really spoke to her natural talent as an actor. She also pulled off another rare feat when she effortlessly went from adorable child star to serious teen actor via her role as Jenny Humphrey on The CW drama “Gossip Girl.” 

Another aspect of Momsen’s scene-stealing performance in “Grinch” was her sweet rendition of the song “Where Are You Christmas?” While it would take a few years, she eventually returned to music when she formed the band The Pretty Reckless in 2009. It was during her time as a budding rock star that her new look really started to take shape, adopting a much more punk rock vibe than any of the characters she had played. 

But even on “Gossip Girl,” Momsen already looked much different than she did as a child actor — owing in no small part to her newly dyed blonde locks. As she enters her 30s, Momsen now only slightly resembles her Jenny Humphrey era and couldn’t look any more different than her Cindy Lou Who days.

While Johnny Depp’s first screen credit was in an iconic movie — “A Nightmare on Elm Street” — and he also had a small role in “Platoon,” it was on TV’s “21 Jump Street” that he first achieved breakout success. It’s hard to imagine the Johnny Depp we know now being a clean-cut character on a network television show and adorning the covers of teen magazines, but that’s indeed the Johnny Depp that most of the world first took notice of.

The thing about Depp is that he’s known for completely disappearing into his roles. Many of his characters look completely different from one another, and often, quite different from Depp himself. But that doesn’t change how different Depp looks now than he did when he first started acting. Some of the most basic features are still there — but in addition to just the normal effects of aging, Depp is better known today for a more relaxed look that includes unkempt hair and a somewhat scraggly goatee. And unless he’s at an event that requires formal dress, he is most commonly seen wearing ’90s-era grunge attire of flannels, jeans, knit hats, etc. 

In other words, he’s as opposite as he could possibly be from “Jump Street” character Tom Hanson now as he was on the original show — something that was played to comedic effect when Depp agreed to cameo as the character in the 2012 “21 Jump Street” film under one very specific condition.

Even though he only appeared in nine episodes of “Full House,” Michelle’s friend Derek still left a lasting impact on fans of the sitcom. Of course, a lot of that could have to do with the fact that “Full House” reruns remained a staple on television for many years, meaning that people saw those nine episodes over and over again. That alone would have helped to imprint actor Blake McIver Ewing, who played Derek, onto the childhoods of ’90s kids. But what further cemented his place in that generation’s collective consciousness was that Ewing also played rich kid Waldo Johnston III in the 1994 film adaptation of “The Little Rascals.”

Given that he was only 10 years old when both of those roles were behind him, it stands to reason that the now grown-up Blake McIver Ewing looks quite a bit different than he did back then. In fact, even when he reprised the role of Derek in a 2020 episode of Netflix’s “Fuller House,” it would have been easy to assume another actor was playing the part. But it was, in fact, a 35-year-old Ewing: it was the first screen acting that Ewing had done in close to 20 years, only showing up on television in the interim as himself as a host of Bravo’s reality series “The People’s Couch.” He also added music and dancing to his performing arts repertoire, spending some time as a go-go dancer and releasing an album in the 2010s. 

It’s tempting to point to the “Twilight” series as Kristen Stewart’s big breakout. But to do so unfairly discounts her noteworthy turns in major releases like “Panic Room” and “Zathura: A Space Adventure,” not to mention her roles in various indie movies throughout the 2000s. Stewart was far from a newcomer when she accepted the role of Bella Swan, which catapulted her to massive worldwide stardom. 

In the first phase of her career, up to and through the “Twilight” era, Stewart had a pretty standard “all-American girl” vibe to her look and her fashion choices. But around the mid-2010s, likely due in large part to being free of her “Twilight” obligations and needing to maintain the same basic look for an entire franchise, Stewart began to get a lot more creative and interesting in her fashion and style choices. Her previous long straight hair mostly gave way to various shorter bobs, sometimes bordering on a buzzcut. She also tends to now be blonde a lot more often than not. A New Yorker piece in 2021 called Stewart “her generation’s most interesting movie star.” 

She has definitely come a long way since the Bella Swan days, with both her looks and her career seeming to belong to a completely different person than Stewart used to be. To put it more accurately, she now has the confidence to be the real Kristen Stewart. 

Renée Zellweger was a consistent presence in film throughout the 1990s and 2000s. You can pick any number of roles as her most iconic, and there wouldn’t be a wrong answer: the titular Bridget Jones in that series (which earned Zellweger her first Oscar nomination), Dorothy Boyd in “Jerry Maguire,” her Oscar-nominated role as Roxie Hart in “Chicago,” her Oscar-winning role as Ruby Thewes in “Cold Mountain” — TheShockNews goes on and on. She worked steadily until 2010, when she took a self-imposed hiatus after that year’s “My Own Love Song.”

When Zellweger started wading back into the limelight around 2014, various media outlets took note of what was seen as a change in her appearance. Naturally, the immediate assumption was plastic surgery — and Zellweger initially took all the speculation about her appearance and the presumed reasons why she must have felt compelled to go under the knife as a major blow to her ego. However, she eventually decided to see the bright side of all the scrutiny. Reflecting on that period a few years later, she told People, “I’m glad folks think I look different! I’m living a different, happy, more fulfilling life, and I’m thrilled that perhaps it shows.” 

Zellweger has chosen to neither confirm nor deny that she had plastic surgery. She’s instead content to let people know that no matter what they think about her appearance or her choices, she’s comfortable in her own skin and living her best life. 

It’s impossible not to talk about actors who have seen drastic physical changes over the years without bringing up Mickey Rourke. In the 1980s, Rourke was one of Hollywood’s go-to actors when it needed someone who was traditionally handsome but with a slight bad boy edge, and who could play just the right amount of charming and dangerous. Starring in the boundary-pushing erotic drama “9½ Weeks” in 1986 opposite Kim Basinger helped to launch him to a whole other level — one that he unfortunately struggled to maintain due to various issues in his personal life. 

Rourke was an amateur boxer before he was an actor, and decided to give that another shot in 1991 after feeling like he “had no respect for [himself] being an actor,” as he later told Film Journal. Rourke proved extremely skilled in the ring and actually went undefeated during his eight fights as a professional boxer between 1991 and 1994. However, just because you win the match doesn’t mean you didn’t take a beating. Due to all the injuries to his face from his time as a boxer, Rourke needed facial reconstruction surgery to fix the damage — but as he told The Independent, “I went to the wrong guy to put my face back together.”

Subsequent plastic surgeries followed to try to repair the damage done by his boxing injuries and the botched surgery to correct them, leaving Rourke almost unrecognizable from his time as one of Hollywood’s most promising leading men.