Eight actors who didn't need special-effects makeup to play aliens

After wowing us with only her voice in the futuristic phone-love romance Her, Scarlett Johansson continues to score by taking on challenges—the newest one coming in Under the Skin. In this dark, arrestingly strange film (directed by Birth’s inspired Jonathan Glazer), Johansson plays a curious alien who adopts an alluring shape (and a wild wig) to attract specimens; along the way, she learns a little about human nature as well.

Here are eight actors who took similar plunges into alien roles with limited recourse to makeup, props or otherworldly intelligence—we think.