Trace your way through Vince Vaughn’s career – from affable-boyish late-90s Vince, past affable-goofball noughties Vince and all the way to affable-jaded latter-day Vince – and you probably wouldn’t expect his next role to involve grinding another man’s skull into a cold concrete floor. Or snapping an assailant’s arm over his knee like a piece of firewood.

But cinema is always capable of springing a glorious surprise, and Brawl in Cell Block 99 is certainly that: a spectacularly gruesome Ronseal tin of a thriller, plotted with a grownup’s patience and delivered with adolescent glee. Fitting, then, that it should be Hollywood’s perennial man-child who’s tasked with carrying the film. And Vaughn, trading in his motormouth and five o’clock shadow for a southern drawl and crucifix-emblazoned skinhead, lugs things along with conviction. The makeover is so convincing that, after an hour or so of watching him heave his hulking frame around the screen, maiming and dismembering anyone who comes near, it’s impossible to imagine him as the lovable loser of the last two decades.

After 20 years of pithy high jinks, could this be the start of a late-career pivot towards heavyweight gloom? If so – and a similar turn in the best-forgotten second series of True Detective suggests it might well be – then here are five actors he could take some tips from.

Dick Powell

Half a century before the word “McConaissance” infected the lexicon, Powell was beating a path that would become well-trodden. Making his name as a sweet-voiced singer, Powell spent the first decade of his career signed with Warner Bros, bringing his nice-guy crooning to romantic musicals with titles such as Flirtation Walk and Naughty But Nice. But the urge to broaden his range got the better of him and he quit the studio, eventually convincing Warner rivals RKO to cast him in Murder, My Sweet as a whiskey-fuelled private eye named Philip Marlowe. The character, invented by Raymond Chandler in the 1940 novel on which the film was based, proved a screen sensation, and Powell promptly made himself at home in the murky world of film noir, spending his next few years following dubiously motivated women down dark alleys and helping shape a seminal cinematic age.

Helena Bonham Carter

One-movie makeover … Helena Bonham Carter in Fight Club. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/20 Century Fox

It seems long ago, but there was a time when the gothic empress of British film was a mainstay of romantic epics. While Bonham Carter’s early career was livened up by a two-episode role in Miami Vice, it was almost exclusively spent playing despairingly lovestruck ladies of the upper middle classes. She did it well, too: her breakout performance in A Room With a View was much lauded and, 12 years later, her turn in The Wings of the Dove got her an Oscar nomination. But if a small part in the 1994 film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein had hinted at a taste for the macabre, her role in Fight Club four years later showed it to be a fully fledged craving. Marla Singer was a pill-popping crackpot who got her kicks from infiltrating support groups for the terminal ill – not a hobby the Lucy Honeychurches of the world would be too keen on – and effectively gave the actor a one-movie makeover. Three years later, she met director Tim Burton, and her role as one half of cinema’s ashen-faced power couple was under way.

Robin Williams

Icy genius … Robin Williams with Connie Nielsen in One Hour Photo. Photograph: François Duhamel/AP

Williams’ Oscar-winning turn in Good Will Hunting, as the paternal psychologist who sweet-talks Matt Damon into finding himself, is often looked back on as a left-field career move. In some ways it was – until then he’d spent the 1990s monkeying around in screwball comedies – but for the most part his earnest father-figure role was a retread of what he’d done in Dead Poets Society. The real reinvention came five years after Good Will Hunting. In 2002, Williams starred in three films; in One Hour Photo and Insomnia he played icily psychotic serial killers, while the other – the forgotten gem Death to Smoochy – was an inky-black comedy in which he played a corrupt and vengeance-seeking kids’ TV host. Unfortunately for us, the transformation wasn’t as full-scale as it might have been: the following years brought mostly child-friendly chuckles peppered with the odd crack at the scary stuff. But it was good fun while it lasted.

Takeshi Kitano

No laughing matter ... Takeshi Kitano in Zatoichi Photograph: Allstar/MIRAMAX/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Since the late 80s Kitano, via a steady stream of masterful Yakuza movies, has become synonymous with a very specific type of gangster character – unspeaking, existentially anguished, reluctantly engaging in sickening violence – and in the process has become one of the most successful movie stars in Japanese history. Before then, though, he was a grade-A doofus, one half of an Abbott and Costello-esque comedy duo, his madcap persona offset by Nirō Kaneko’s straight man and increasingly notorious for his PC-flouting gags. In his first serious film, Kitano’s arrival on screen prompted reflex laughs from the audience. But with one poetically detached gunman after another, Kitano went from cracking wise to cracking skulls, from tickling ribs to bludgeoning them in. Slapstick’s loss was blood-spattered crime drama’s gain.

Naomi Watts

Unshackling her sinister side … Naomi Watts in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Photograph: StudioCanal/Rex/Shutterstock

Until her descent into nightmarish insanity in Mulholland Drive, Watts had spent her short career flitting between Aussie soap operas (Home and Away), quirky cult hits (Tank Girl) and B-movies (Children of the Corn IV). But since her sinister side was unshackled, she has made a point of indulging it as often as possible. No other actor has worked under all three of cinema’s unholy trinity of directors: Michael Haneke, David Cronenberg and David Lynch. That’s to say nothing of her sterling work in the Ring remakes and the little-seen Hitchcockian horror Shut In.

Matthew McConaughey

Sneaky gambit … Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club. Photograph: Anne Marie Fox/AP

The most famed and, by the shaky barometer of Academy recognition, the most successful of Hollywood’s dark-side reinventions. McConaughey’s Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club, the culmination of a two-year renovation project that saw him move fearlessly from handsome-charming to handsome-brooding, raised a couple of questions. First, why hadn’t the Oscar come for Mud, an infinitely better film and an infinitely better performance, a year earlier? And second, isn’t this a sneaky gambit: masquerading as a one-trick pony and then, a decade or so later, revealing that you can do something different after all? If acting is the process of creating characters, then playing the same role on repeat is a kind of anti-acting. Which is in itself no bad thing – there’s plenty to be said for fine-tuning your art, and I enjoy each Ryan Gosling outing as much as the last – but should it really score you extra points when awards season rolls around?

Given the grindhouse leanings of Vaughn’s latest film, it’s probably not a debate anyone will be having about him just yet. But if he is offered a place on the Academy’s shortlist come February, he should snap their hand off.