This article is about a person who resembles another. For a paranormal double, seeDoppelgänger.
Aselfie of American senatorChris Coons (left) and German chancellorOlaf Scholz, who have been noted to resemble each other[1]
Alook-alike, ordouble, is a person who bears a strong physical resemblance to another person, excluding cases liketwins and other instances offamily resemblance.
Some look-alikes have been notable individuals in their own right. Other notable look-alikes have been notable solely for resembling well-known individuals, such asClifton James, who acted as a double for British Field MarshalBernard Montgomery duringWorld War II.
Illustration from the paper "Look-alike humans identified by facial recognition algorithms show genetic similarities"
According to a paper published in 2022 in the journalCell Reports, look-alikes share many common genetic variations and are more likely than non-look-alikes to have characteristics in common.[3][4]
With the advent ofsocial media, there have been several reported cases of people finding their "twin stranger" online.[5][6] There are several websites where users can upload a photo of themselves andfacial recognition software attempts to match them with another user of like appearance. Some of these sites report that they have found numerous living doppelgängers.[7][8]
A popular story about KingUmberto I of Italy tells of the king eating in a restaurant and discovering the owner was his dead-ringer double. The story goes that upon talking to the man, Umberto learned of a string of coincidences between their lives, such as: the two men had been born in the same town on the same day, and had both married a woman with the same name, and the restaurant had opened on the day of Umberto's coronation.[9] Umberto's assassination in 1900 is said to have happened the same day that he heard the news that the restaurateur had died in a shooting.[9] This story is cited often in popular culture (Ripley's Believe It or Not!,The Big Book of the Unexplained) and may have been embellished somewhat.
TheUnited Kingdom's KingGeorge V (1865–1936) andRussia's TsarNicholas II (1868–1918), who were first cousins (their mothers were sisters), bore an uncanny resemblance. Their facial features were distinguishable only up close, particularly their eyes. At George's wedding in 1893, according toThe Times ofLondon, the crowd may have mistaken Nicholas for George due to their similar beards and attire.[10]
An urban legend claims thatCharlie Chaplin entered one of the many Chaplin look-alike contests and lost.[11] It is retold in the musicalChaplin.
In the 1970s, actor-comedian Richard M. Dixon (born James LaRoe), look-alike to then-PresidentRichard Nixon, gained some celebrity, portraying the president in the films,Richard (1972) andThe Faking of the President (1976). He also appeared in directorWoody Allen's initially unreleasedshort filmMen of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story (1971).
British stuntmanVic Armstrong acted asHarrison Ford'sbody double in all the films of the originalIndiana Jones trilogy. Reportedly, Armstrong looked so much like Harrison Ford that the crew members on set were constantly mistaking him for Ford.[12]
TheBBC comedy programmeDoubletake made extensive use of look-alikes playing their doubles in apparently embarrassing situations, seen throughCCTV cameras and amateur video, using distance shots and shaky camera-work to disguise the true identity of those being filmed. Due to the nature of this programme and conditions of filming, many of the world's most authentic lookalikes boycotted the project leaving the producer to rely on the careful use of soft focus, lighting and carefully positioned camera angles to make the mainly amateur lookalikes resemble the characters they portrayed.
Steve Sires, a look-alike ofMicrosoft'sBill Gates, came to attention when he attempted to trademark "Microsortof", and subsequently acted in Microsoft commercials. He appeared as Gates in the filmsNothing So Strange (2002) andThe Social Network (2010).
UKCelebrity Big Brother contestantChantelle Houghton worked briefly and unsuccessfully for a look-alike agency as aParis Hilton look-alike, earning the nickname "ParisTravelodge". By the time Chantelle Houghton wonseries 4 ofCelebrity Big Brother, the same agency had already signed up a professional model who made a more convincing Paris Hilton look-alike and who was briefly also offered as a fake "Chantelle".[13]
UKRichard and Judy ran a competition for Little Britain Lookalikes in 2005. After the live final broadcast on Friday, 28 January 2005, onChannel Four, two winning contestants, Gavin Pomfret and Stuart Morrison, formed a Little Britain tribute act called "Littler Britain."
Dolly Parton has stated that she lost a 'Dolly Parton Look-Alike Contest'.[14]
In 2008 a friend pointed out toBronx nativeLouis Ortiz his striking resemblance to then-presidential-candidateBarack Obama. Ortiz, initially as a money-making venture, sought gigs as an Obamaimpersonator. Ryan Murdock produced a documentary film about Ortiz's experiences,Bronx Obama.[15]
Larissa Tudor looked strikingly similar to formerGrand Duchess Tatiana of Russia. Larissa's background was sketchy and included a lot of irregularities. After her death in 1926 it was rumored that she was the former grand duchess. When author Occleshaw wrote a book about Larissa 60 years after her death, those who had known her identified a picture of the former Grand Duchess Tatiana as being Larissa.
Howard X is a professional impersonator who looks like the North Korean leaderKim Jong-Un.
Two baseball players, both calledBrady Feigl, share an uncanny resemblance to each other. Additionally, both are pitchers for their respective baseball teams, they are the same height, and they both suffered an elbow injury that was treated by the same doctor.
InFyodor Dostoyevsky'snovellaThe Double (1846), an insecure, gauche government clerk inSt. Petersburg, Russia, Yakov Pyotrovich Golyadkin,psychotically encounters a double of himself who looks identical to him but has all the charm, unctuousness, and social skills that he himself lacks.
Georg Kaiser's 1917 playThe Coral depicts a powerful industrialist whose male secretary is his exact double. The secretary's duties include impersonating his employer at public functions. Other employees can tell the two men apart only by the fact that the secretary always wears a coral watch-fob.
InRobert Heinlein's novelDouble Star (1956), actor Lawrence Smith is approached to impersonate prominent politician John Joseph Bonforte, who has been kidnapped. Despite his initial antipathy toward Bonforte's policies, Smythe eventually comes to admire Bonforte. He continues this performance through an election and, when Bonforte dies, continues in the role for the rest of his life, in honor of Bonforte's legacy.
InDaphne du Maurier's novelThe Scapegoat (1957), an Englishman meets his double, a French aristocrat, while visiting France, and is forced into changing places with him, finding himself caught up in all the intrigues and passions of his double's complex family.
InRichard Powell's novelDon Quixote, U.S.A. (1966), Arthur Peabody Goodpasture, an ineptPeace Corps volunteer and the spitting image of El Gavilan, a revolutionary leader in the fictional Republic of San Marco in South America, is forced to assume the identity of El Gavilan after the original is kidnapped and taken to the Soviet Union when El Gavilan's plot to have Goodpasture abducted by the Russians goes wrong.
"The Leader and the Damned" (1983) byColin Forbes is a secret history thriller whose plot is based on the assumption thatAdolf Hitler was assassinated in 1943, a bomb completely destroying his body. The Nazi hierarchy kept this as a top secret and gota double to impersonate Hitler, and it was this double who led Nazi Germany until its final demise in 1945.
InClive Cussler's 1984 novelDeep Six, adouble is used after the U.S. president is kidnapped by Korean and Soviet agents.
InDavid Lodge's 1984 novelSmall World, the protagonist keeps running into two women, Angelica and Lily, who are identical twin sisters with confusingly different personalities.
José Saramago's 2002 novelThe Double traces the intertwining lives of a history teacher and his bit-actor identical double, one of whom ends up dead while the other ends up living with the other's widow.
InTana French's 2008 novel,The Likeness, detective Cassie Maddox has doppelgängerLexie Madison who adopts the same alias Maddox used in an undercover investigation.
In Britain'sPrivate Eye magazine, a long-running satirical feature of the letters section intentionally reverses the captions on look-alike photographs.[21][circular reference]
InA.M. Kherbash's novelLesath (2019) the protagonist is mistaken for an escaped inmate and is incarcerated in a remote facility.
The Student of Prague (1926): Balduin is followed by his double after making a deal with the devil.
The 1932 musical filmThe Phantom President depicts a man who is eminently qualified to be President of the United States but who is unlikely to be elected because he is dull and lacks charisma. Fortunately, he has an exact double: a patent-medicine salesman and vaudeville hoofer who is a charismatic campaigner but has no actual political qualifications. The film cynically suggests that most American voters would prefer the latter to the former. Both roles are played by legendary song-and-dance manGeorge M. Cohan.
The 1940 comedy filmThe Great Dictator wasCharlie Chaplin's firsttalkie and his most commercially successful film. Chaplin plays both "Adenoid Hynkel" (asatirized Adolf Hitler) and aJewish barber who is Hynkel's spitting image. The barber eventually replaces Hynkel, who has been arrested after having been mistaken for the barber. On nationwide radio the barber, impersonating the dictator, declares in a great rousing speech an end toantisemitism and a return to democracy.
Angel on My Shoulder (1946):The Devil persuades a deceased gangster, played byPaul Muni, to let his soul possess the body of an honest judge who looks exactly like the gangster and who is causing the Devil distress with his honesty.
The Magic Face (1951): Adolf Hitler is killed by his valet and double, Rudi Janus, who takes his place.
The Square Peg (1959):Norman Wisdom plays road repairer Norman Pitkin, who is called up for the army and sent to Nazi-occupied France, and also Pitkin's exact double, General Schreiber.
The Scapegoat (1959):Alec Guinness plays both a French aristocrat and the English schoolteacher who is maneuvered into taking his place so the Frenchman can have an alibi for a murder.
In theJames Bond filmThunderball (1965), FrenchNATO pilot François Derval is murdered by Angelo, aSPECTRE henchman who has been surgically altered to match Derval's appearance. Angelo then takes Derval's place aboard, and seizes, a NATO plane loaded with twoatom bombs.
InThe Double Man (1967) an American CIA agent (Yul Brynner) is lured to Austria, so that an East German lookalike can take his place.
In theMetro-Goldwyn-Mayer filmWhere Eagles Dare (1968), set in the winter of 1943–44, aU.S. ArmyBrigadier General George Carnaby (Robert Beatty), who is a chief planner for the Western Front, is captured by the Germans. He is taken for interrogation to a mountaintop fortress and needs to be rescued by a team of Allied commandos before the Germans realize that he is in fact an impostor, a lookalike U.S. corporal named Cartwright Jones.
InGentlemen of Fortune (1971), a Soviet crime comedy movie,Yevgeny Leonov plays both the protagonist, a good-hearted kindergarten principal Yevgeny Troshkin, and his exact double, a vile crime boss nicknamed "Docent". Since Docent stole a precious artifact and refused to give it out, the police hire Troshkin to impersonate him, so he could get any useful information from Docent's henchmen. Eventually, this results in Troshkin slowly re-educating the gang.
Love and Death: 1975Woody Allen satire on 19th-century Russian novels, set during the 1812French invasion of Russia. A coward, Boris Grushenko (Allen), and his wife Sonja (Diane Keaton) decide to assassinate EmperorNapoleon Bonaparte. A double of the Emperor is killed, and Allen's character is executed.
InThe Eagle Has Landed (1976), based onJack Higgins's novel, German paratroopers attempt in 1943 to abduct Prime MinisterWinston Churchill from an English village. It is revealed that it is actually apolitical decoy who visits the village and is assassinated.
Joseph Losey's 1976 filmMr. Klein starsAlain Delon as an art dealer in Nazi-occupied Paris who receives a Jewish newspaper addressed to him. When the police suspect him as a member of the resistance, he begins a relentless pursuit of his supposed doppelgänger.
InFoul Play (1978), starringGoldie Hawn andChevy Chase, the twin of an Americanarchbishop kills the archbishop, impersonates him, and plots to assassinate a fictitiousPope Pius XIII.
Akira Kurosawa'sKagemusha (1980): the warlordTakeda Shingen (1521–73) is sometimes impersonated by his brother Nobukado. Nobukado saves a thief who is to be executed, because the man bears an astonishing resemblance to Shingen. The thief becomes akagemusha (shadow warrior) and learns the role ofdaimyō Shingen, who is subsequently killed by an enemy sniper. The false identity of thekagemusha is revealed when he is unable to ride Lord Shingen's favorite horse; but in the finalbattle at Nagashino thekagemusha accepts his role and fights as the last man holding the banner of the Takeda clan.
The filmDouble Trouble (1984) features comedian duoBud Spencer andTerence Hill playing two billionaires who, fearing for their lives after several assassination attempts, hire two look-alikes.
In a feature-length episode of the BritishsitcomOnly Fools and Horses entitled "Miami Twice", Derek is mistaken for aMafia don who is his spitting image, and he is used by the Mafia in an attempt to fake the don's assassination (though several tries fail). The likeness is so uncanny that even Derek's brother Rodney is tricked. Both Derek and the don are played byDavid Jason.
InRingo Lam's 1996Maximum Risk,Jean-Claude Van Damme is a French policeman who discovers that a man who has been killed by theRussian Mafia was his look-alike twin brother that he never knew he had. Tracing the dead brother's footsteps, the protagonist inadvertently "inherits" the brother's predicaments and girlfriend.
The 1999 filmStar Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace features Queen Amidala ofNaboo, whose planet is in crisis due to its illegal occupation by theTrade Federation. Near the conclusion of the film it is revealed that the "queen" (Keira Knightley) is in fact merelya handmaiden being used as adecoy, andPadmé (Natalie Portman) is the real queen, and has been posing as one of her own handmaidens. Knightley was cast in the role due to her close resemblance to Portman; even the two actresses' mothers had trouble distinguishing them in full make-up.[23]
In the 1999 filmBowfinger the plot centers on a down-and-out filmmaker in Hollywood attempting to make a film on a small budget with a star who does not know that he is in the film, while also utilizing a lookalike of the star to shoot several scenes.
Vantage Point (2008): a decoy helps protect the president from a possible assassination threat—and is shot. The film claims that "doubles have been used sinceReagan."
Masquerade (2012): South Korean historical film starringLee Byung-hun indual roles as the bizarre KingGwanghae and the humble acrobat Ha-sun, who stands in for the King when he faces the threat of being poisoned.
Denis Villeneuve'sEnemy (2013) tells the story of a troubled history professor who, while watching a film, discovers an actor who is physically identical to himself. The two men's lives begin to intertwine and blur the boundaries of individual identity.
The Lookalike (2014) follows two criminals as they attempt to find a lookalike love interest for a drug lord after the unexpected death of the girl he's actually interested in.
Several episodes ofAdventures of Superman (1952–58) featured actors in dual roles as their doppelgangers, including "The Face and the Voice", in whichGeorge Reeves plays both the Man of Steel and a small-time criminal who is hired to impersonate him and wreak havoc.
The year afterJames Garner left the television seriesMaverick in 1959, in which he had portrayed a gambler namedBret Maverick,Warner Bros. studio hired Garner lookalikeRobert Colbert to play Bret Maverick's brother Brent Maverick, who had never previously been mentioned, and dressed him in exactly the same costume.
The Patty Duke Show (1963–66) starred Duke in a dual role as "identical cousins".
In theABC television seriesThe Double Life of Henry Phyfe (1966),Red Buttons is the title character, a look-alike of a recently deceased foreign agent. A US intelligence agency recruits him to impersonate the agent on multiple occasions, on their behalf, despite his lack of intelligence-gathering skills.
In theInspector Morse two-part episode, "The Settling of the Sun" (1988), aJapanese summer student atOxford University, Yukio Ley, and his double become victims of murders connected with revenge for JapaneseWorld War II atrocities.
The Lookalike (a made-for-TV thriller, 1990): A mentally disturbed woman is further tormented after discovering a girl who closely resembles her recently deceased daughter.
TheCBS television series ofreality specials,I Get That a Lot (2009–13), poked fun at the concept of "celebrity lookalikes", featuring celebrities appearing in everyday situations, such as working as clerks at stores. When pegged as celebrities, they would simply state some variation of the titular phrase, "I get that a lot," pretending that they were ordinary individuals who had been mistaken for celebrities.
InThe CW's seriesThe Vampire Diaries (2009–17), doppelgängers were an important arc in the story. The female lead character,Elena Gilbert (Nina Dobrev), is a doppelgänger of a thousand-year old immortal named Amara, a descendant named Tatia, and an antagonistic vampire namedKatherine Pierce/Katerina Petrova. Their bloodline is called the Petrova Family. The male lead character,Stefan Salvatore (Paul Wesley), is also a doppelgänger of Amara's love, Silas, the first immortal. This led to the prophecy that Elena and Stefan, as doppelgängers of the first immortals, are soulmates and are fated to be with each other.
In the eighth-season episode "Mr. Monk Is Someone Else" ofMonk (originally aired Aug. 28, 2009), the titular detective is recruited to impersonate a dead mob hit man who was his double.
In the sitcomHow I Met Your Mother, throughout the fifth and sixth seasons (aired 2009–2011), the five main characters each encounter an identical stranger of themself. By the episode "Double Date", they have spottedMarshall's doppelgänger, who they nickname "Moustache Marshall", andRobin's ("Lesbian Robin"). In the same episode they findLily's doppelgänger, a Russian stripper named Jasmine. Later, in the episode "Robots Versus Wrestlers", the gang findsTed's double, a Mexican wrestler, but Ted himself is not there to witness it. In "Doppelgangers", Lily and Marshall decide that as soon as they findBarney's doppelgänger, it will be a sign from the universe for them to start trying to have children. Lily spots a pretzel vendor whom she thinks looks like Barney, but in reality looks nothing like him. Marshall takes this mistake as Lily subconsciously affirming her desire for motherhood and they decide to start trying for a baby. They meet Barney's real doppelgänger — Dr. John Stangel — in the episode "Bad News", though they initially believe him to be Barney in disguise.
The third episode of the fourth season ofElementary, an Americanprocedural drama television series that presents a contemporary update ofSir Arthur Conan Doyle's characterSherlock Holmes, has a focus on the doppelgänger phenomenon. In the episode "Tag, You're Me" (originally aired Nov. 19, 2015), the victims of Sherlock Holmes's latest case found each other via a doppelgänger-finding website. One of the victims, and the culprit of another case investigated in the same episode, had searched for their twin strangers in order to dodge a DNA test for a crime they had committed years before.
InMetal Gear Solid, former drill instructor and adviser to the game's protagonistSolid SnakeMcDonnell Benedict Miller, better known by his nicknameMaster Miller is murdered before the game main events and replaced by main antagonistLiquid Snake in disguise. Liquid, as Master Miller, tricks Solid Snake into unknowingly do his bidding. The plot is discovered byColonelRoy Campbell and his staff, who track Miller's communications and find out they are coming from Shadow Moses Island after the real Master Miller's corpse is found dead in his house.
InCall of Duty: Black Ops the first mission consists in assassinating Fidel Castro. The player succeeds, but at the end, it is revealed that the Fidel Castro he killed was actually a body double.
InAce Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Gambit, Di-Jun Wang, the president of the fictional country of Zheng Fa, was assassinated and replaced with a body double 12 years prior to the game's events. Though the protagonists meet Wang's double in the game's first episode, they do not learn the truth until the final episode, when Wang's double is also assassinated.
^Leibowitz, Ben."Celebrity Doppelgangers for NBA Stars".Bleacher Report. Retrieved2022-04-17.Kidding aside, Andrew Bynum and Tracy Morgan look extremely alike. It's almost as if Morgan could be Bynum's long-lost father.
