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The stars of Saturday Night Live are known for their over-the-top antics and wild characters. While some of the stars go on to continue this trend as Adam Sandler has in film and Tina Fey and Tracy Morgan do on 30 Rock, there are occasionally actors who come out of SNL with surprisingly serious and toned down roles.

This season, TV offers two very different sides to some of of SNL's most memorable stars, and their transformations are nothing less than miraculous.

While ABC's new show In the Motherhood, premiering Thursday at 8 p.m., is a comedy, the performance by co-star Horatio Sanz is still a huge departure from what fans might expect. When you hear that he plays the male nanny for Curb Your Enthusiasm's Cheryl Hines' baby, you might expect an exaggerated and forced performance.

His SNL characters were often loud and obnoxious characters, and Sanz's film roles include the painfully awful Boat Trip, where he and Cuba Gooding Jr. play straight men stuck on a gay cruise.

However, on In the Motherhood, Sanz is surprisingly good, a quiet, subtle actor playing a man who is truly devoted to his job. "Subtle" is probably not a word you'd ever associate with Horatio Sanz, so even though the show is a comedy, this isn't the broad, wacky sitcom you would imagine for him.

However, that role pales in comparison to the chilling and dark transformation Darrell Hammond has taken this season on the FX legal thriller Damages. That's right, in case you weren't watching (and even if you have and just didn't recognize him), Hammond plays a ruthless lackey who does whatever his boss needs, including murder.

This isn't the kind of thing you'd expect from the man who's played President Clinton, Dick Cheney, and Celebrity Jeopardy's Sean Connery. It's hard to imagine what role he would be suited for.

That isn't an insult, but a compliment. Even on SNL, Hammond is a true chameleon who can seemingly take on any role or any character and play it to perfection. There's no typecasting him, and the people at Damages must have seen something very special about that.

On the show, he plays The Deacon, the man behind the scenes for Walter Kendrick, a powerful CEO of a major energy supplier. Whenever Kendrick wants something dirty done, whether it's insider trading or murder, he calls up The Deacon to deal with it.

Hammond's performance is so chilling because there is no character. The Deacon does nothing on his own, and he has no opinions or emotions of his own; he simply waits for instructions. Seeing Hammond strip down a performance to this level of nothingness is such a radical departure from many of his SNL characters.

These two performances help to show that Saturday Night Live might have a lot more behind its success than just topical humor and broad jokes about wacky characters. Whether it's Darrell Hammond in Damages or Horatio Sanz in In the Motherhood, some of of SNL's most over-the-top performers are proving that there's more to them than just a funny face.

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