Meaning
To cast an actor repeatedly in the same kind of role, so that performer and part become inseparable in the public mind - and, by extension, to regard anyone as fit for only one narrow kind of job or behaviour. The actor who plays villains until no one will accept them as a romantic lead has been typecast. Usually passive: to be typecast. The noun typecasting names the practice, and playing against type or cast against type its deliberate defeat. Figurative use carries the same hint of unfair confinement. Regional use: American English origin; now general English.
Origin
From the composite of type and cast: the actor is cast to type. The dictionaries disagree on the first record by nearly two decades: Merriam-Webster dates typecast to 1927, while the OED's earliest evidence for the verb type-cast is from 1946, in the writing of S. H. Adams. Wikipedia's Typecasting article covers the phenomenon - the character actor locked into a kind of part, with playing against type as the deliberate escape. The fearsome version of the fate is well known: actors so identified with a role that no other work follows, the fate the article illustrates through its Star Trek and character-actor examples. The figurative use extends the idea to anyone judged capable of only one thing.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- typecasting
- typecasts
Usage Examples
- After three seasons as the same detective, she worried she had been typecast for good.
- He played heavies so long that casting directors typecast him without auditions.
- Teachers get typecast too: once the strict one, always the strict one.