For the next couple of months, we’re going to be seeing double at the movies.
Fresh off seeing multiple Theo James’s going psychotic over a killer monkey, we’ve got Robert Pattinson playing the various “printed copies” of unlucky astronaut Mickey Barnes in Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, Robert De Niro as rival mob bosses in The Alto Knights, and Michael B. Jordan as vampire hunting siblings in Sinners.
We’ve seen actors take on dual roles before, but never have we had so many in such a short space of time. To celebrate, we’re counting down ten of our personal favourite movie doppelgangers to have graced our screens throughout cinema history, and what gives them the edge.
10. Coming To America
The likes of Jerry Lewis, Peter Sellers and the Monty Python troupe pushed the envelope across various vehicles where they played too many characters to keep up with. They were all clear precursors to Eddie Murphy in Coming To America, who used the same conceit to advance his movie star persona beyond the wisecracking lead of movies like Beverly Hills Cop, into the chameleonic star you'd expect he would have become after breaking out on Saturday Night Live.
Yes, the success of Coming To America meant that Murphy would return to this multiple persona well with increasingly diminishing returns – including directly paying tribute to Lewis with his Nutty Professor remake – but that doesn’t take away from the humour or charm of seeing him expand his screen persona here. It’s revelatory in the context of his leading roles of this era, helping to re-establish what he would become as a comedic force, and still stands tall as one of his definitive performances.
9. The Prestige
Is the key to a great dual performance the way an actor emphasises their chameleonic nature to portray opposing personalities, or only making subtle changes depending on the scene, so one identity blurs into the other?
One of the reasons many argue that The Prestige holds up as one of Christopher Nolan’s best films is how it uses the shifting personas of its actors as a distraction from the real magic trick. It’s a structural gambit even more ambitious than his breakout Memento, and the first sign he’d remain a major force in Hollywood once his Batman run would be completed.
8. Us
After winning an Oscar for her debut acting role in 12 Years A Slave, Lupita Nyong’o has become one of Hollywood’s most underserved talents; a force-of-nature performer who is rarely afforded the showcase vehicles she so clearly warrants. In a film where every principal character plays their own disturbed “tethered” doppelganger, writer/director Jordan Peele ensures his lead star remains the terrifying centre of attention, which would be impressive enough solely on the physically and vocally transformative nature of her turn as Red.
However, what elevates Us is Peele’s more ambitious, morally knotty social satire, in contrast to the easily digestible themes of Get Out. Nyong'o isn’t a straightforward villain in either persona, even as one is initiating a relentless bloodbath, and she draws you into the complexity of each performance beyond the clear differences at the surface.
7. The Eternal Daughter
The most underseen film on this list, but a personal favourite of this writer, is director Joanna Hogg’s supernatural companion piece to her Souvenir films. Tilda Swinton takes over the role played by her daughter Honor Swinton-Byrne in those, whilst reprising her turn as the elderly matriarch of an upper-class family, as the pair head to a remote, near-deserted hotel for a brief parent-and-child getaway.
Despite the uncanny, gothic fantasy tone, Swinton grounds the drama with dual underplayed, naturalistic performances, with Hogg emphasising the emotional distance between the pair by keeping them in separate frames throughout. When we finally do cut to a dinner table wide shot, it’s the most stealthily powerful moment in recent memory, cutting through the spectral air of emotional repression that has defined all three films in this loose saga up to that moment.
6. The Great Dictator
Charlie Chaplin may have been late to the game when it came to pivoting away from silent films, but The Great Dictator is as powerful a force as any when it came to re-establishing the writer/director as one of the greatest comedic performers the medium has ever seen. In a decade that saw many actors associated with silent film struggle with the transition to sound, Chaplin broke away from his Little Tramp persona with two distinct performances that signalled he would be just at home in this new era as he was in his heyday.
Declared a brave work upon release for the way it lampooned a dictator most of the world was either at war or at the brink with, it has endured for generations as the blueprint for a successful political satire, understanding that to win an impassioned argument with brute force, you need as much head and heart as you do scathing gags.
5. Adaptation
Nicolas Cage is one of our most delightfully theatrical performers, and any fan knows that he has far more range than any supercut of his onscreen freak outs would try to convince you against. He’s very knowingly funny, but his secret weapon is that he can be as dry as he is histrionic, and Spike Jonze’s Adaptation pits those two performance styles effectively against each other.
Playing screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and his fictional twin brother Donald in a meta-drama about the difficulty of writing a screenplay, Cage is uncharacteristically asked to ground the genre-hopping drama, with even the heightened doofus role underplayed in comparison to his typical comedic turns. The actor refrains from his usual instincts in the genre here, and it makes for one of the most rewarding performances in a consistently eclectic career.
4. Dead Ringers
Using the life story of twin gynaecologists Stewart and Cyril Marcus as a jumping off point, David Cronenberg bridged the gap between his earlier body horror era and the more ambitious, less accessible one that followed with Dead Ringers. Rather than focus solely on the bond between identical siblings – the recurrent theme in any twin drama – Cronenberg and co-writer Norman Snider aimed to make a morally knottier saga, in which the slimier, womanising brother encourages his shy, reserved counterpart to assume his identity after each conquest.
It has retained a powerful, unsettling resonance as a broader story about consent, but the shifting characteristics of both of Irons’ performances make for even queasier viewing. It remains his finest hour onscreen – there's no wonder that, when accepting his Oscar for Reversal Of Fortune two years later, he shouted out this movie and thanked Cronenberg for giving him the part, even though it wasn’t linked to the film he won for.
3. Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb
Even the most contrarian list of best dual screen performances by an actor can’t avoid including Peter Sellers’ three distinct, over-the-top makeovers in Stanley Kubrick's Cold War satire. Because of its status as a perennial arthouse favourite, there’s an assumption that the political comedy here is of the refined, chin-scratching variety, which couldn’t be further from the truth; more than 60 years on, its hysterical, lowbrow tone when taking on political leaders remains hilarious largely due to how many have failed to match its tone.
Arguably closer in spirit to the madcap, multiple personality Monty Python and Eddie Murphy comedies of later years than the comparatively highbrow work of Armando Iannucci, it’s the sheer, on-the-nose broadness of each of Sellers’ heightened stereotype characters which has helped it remain as eternally hilarious as it is relevant. Where modern satires often resort to telling the paying audience what they already think about world leaders, Dr. Strangelove was revolutionary at the time for pushing beyond what was considered acceptable with such hot button subject matter – if only modern satirists could push the envelope this much whilst staying this silly.
2. Mulholland Drive
The late, great David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive managed to strike a chord with millions of cinephiles, even as the transformative noir tale continues to defy any single, simple explanation. Of course, the filmmaker was always right in his insistence to never offer a definitive reading of any of his puzzle box thrillers; he innately understood that the sudden shifts in Naomi Watts & Laura Harring’s performances here follow an emotional logic far more powerful than any one interpretation.
Mulholland Drive works just as effectively if taken as an out-of-body drama recalling an actress’s last days, a scathing satire on how the industry treats women, a bleak character study on disassociation and suicidal ideation, or any other reading you care to ascribe it. Lynch was a one-of-a-kind genius, but its success on this front can’t be attributed to anybody but its actresses, who help you feel your way through the confusion, even as their personalities are flipped on their head.
1. Vertigo
When it was originally released, Vertigo was the rare Alfred Hitchcock flop of its period, ahead of its time in how it integrated a detective thriller with a groundbreaking psychological character study, shifting the noir genre forward in the way he would to much more instant success in the horror genre with Psycho. Key to this approach isn’t just an against-type James Stewart, whose repressed emotional trauma sees him eventually transform into a behavioural sadist, but Kim Novak, whose complimenting twin performances further complicate what its male protagonist views as a personal shot at redemption.
In a film which initially appears to be a straightforward noir riff, the middle act reveal that Judy engineered a double identity scheme you’d expect from a femme fatale sees Hitchcock deconstruct one of the genre’s most familiar archetypes. Novak avoids leaning too heavily into any overt personality traits associated with this character type to fully become her own warped mirror image – for all of its structural ambition, the ease with which she acclimatises the complexity of this role remains comparatively unheralded, all these years later.
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