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Look-alike

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A selfie of American senator Chris Coons (left) and German chancellor Olaf Scholz, who have been noted to resemble each other[1]

A look-alike, or double, is a person who bears a strong physical resemblance to another person, excluding cases like twins and other instances of family 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 as Clifton James, who acted as a double for British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery during World War II.

Look-alikes of Stalin and Lenin posing with tourists in Moscow

Some look-alikes who have resembled celebrities have worked as entertainers, impersonating them on stage or screen, or at venues like parties and corporate functions. Professional look-alikes have often been represented by talent agencies specializing in celebrity impersonators.[2]

Close physical resemblance between individuals is also a common plot point in works of fiction.

Research

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Illustration from the paper "Look-alike humans identified by facial recognition algorithms show genetic similarities"

According to a paper published in 2022 in the journal Cell 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 of social 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 and facial 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]

Notable look-alikes

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  • A popular story about King Umberto 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.
  • Cousins, the United Kingdom's King George V (1865–1936) and Russia's Tsar Nicholas II (1868–1918), shared an uncanny resemblance. Their facial features were only different up close (especially the eyes). At George's wedding in 1893, according to The Times of London, the crowd may have confused Nicholas with George, because their beards and dress made them look alike.[10]
  • An urban legend claims that Charlie Chaplin entered one of the many Chaplin look-alike contests and lost.[11] It is retold in the musical Chaplin.
  • Mikheil Gelovani, a Georgian actor and Joseph Stalin look-alike, played the Soviet leader in propaganda films of the 1930s and 1940s.[citation needed]

Fictional look-alikes

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Literature

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Film

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Television

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  • Several episodes of Adventures of Superman (1952–58) featured actors in dual roles as their doppelgangers, including "The Face and the Voice", in which George Reeves plays both the Man of Steel and a small-time criminal who is hired to impersonate him and wreak some havoc.
  • The year after James Garner left the television series Maverick in 1959, in which he had portrayed a gambler named Bret Maverick, Warner Bros. studio hired Garner lookalike Robert 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 the ABC television series The 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 the Inspector Morse two-part episode, "The Settling of the Sun" (1988), a Japanese summer student at Oxford University, Yukio Ley, and his double become victims of murders connected with revenge for Japanese World 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.
  • The CBS television series of reality 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.
  • In The CW's series The 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 named Katherine 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" of Monk (originally aired Aug. 28, 2009), the titular detective is recruited to impersonate a dead mob hit man who was his double.
  • In the sitcom How 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 spotted Marshall's doppelgänger, who they nickname "Moustache Marshall", and Robin's ("Lesbian Robin"). In the same episode they find Lily's doppelgänger, a Russian stripper named Jasmine. Later, in the episode "Robots Versus Wrestlers", the gang finds Ted'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 find Barney'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 Woman in White: 2018 five-part BBC television adaptation of the sensation novel of the same name by Wilkie Collins. This TV production was preceded by 1966, 1982, and 1997 TV productions.
  • The third episode of the fourth season of Elementary, an American procedural drama television series that presents a contemporary update of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character Sherlock 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.

Musicals

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Video games

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  • In Final Fantasy VIII, SeeD mercenaries and Forest Owls resistance fighters devise a complicated plan to kidnap the president of Galbadia Vinzer Deling, which includes switching the presidential train wagon from its tracks and replacing it with a mockup. Deling foresees the plan and sends a shapeshifter monster to take his place, who attacks the game protagonists. The monster is ultimately killed, but the plan's failure forces the Forest Owls into hiding.
  • In Metal Gear Solid, former drill instructor and adviser to the game's protagonist Solid Snake McDonnell Benedict Miller, better known by his nickname Master Miller is murdered before the game main events and replaced by main antagonist Liquid Snake in disguise. Liquid, as Master Miller, tricks Solid Snake into unknowingly do his bidding. The plot is discovered by Colonel Roy 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.
  • In Call 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.
  • In Ace 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.

Web series

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  • The Alternates, the main antagonistic force in the analog horror web series The Mandela Catalogue, are a race of demons that are marked by their ability to almost perfectly replicate human beings.

See also

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Notes

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  1. ^ Drenon, Brandon (2024-02-09). "US Senator Chris Coons finds doppelganger in German Chancellor Olaf Scholz". Retrieved 2024-04-01.
  2. ^ Kent, Simon (2002-05-01). Odd Jobs: Unusual Ways to Earn a Living. Kogan Page Ltd. p. 86. ISBN 978-0-7494-3705-3. Retrieved 2018-02-07.
  3. ^ "Look-alike humans identified by facial recognition algorithms show genetic similarities". Cell Reports.
  4. ^ "Doppelgängers Don't Just Look Alike—They Also Share DNA". Smithsonian magazine.
  5. ^ Contrera, Jessica (21 April 2015). "How to find your doppelganger on Facebook". The Washington Post. Retrieved 8 January 2021.
  6. ^ Alderson, Maggie (2015-10-29). "Twin Strangers: The new website can find your doppelganger – but you may not be pleased with your matches". The Independent. Archived from the original on 2017-05-13. Retrieved 2017-05-23.
  7. ^ "Twin Strangers Exist". twinstrangers.net. Archived from the original on 2017-05-21. Retrieved 2017-05-23.
  8. ^ Geaney, Niamh (20 November 2015). Niamh meets her THIRD doppelgänger (YouTube video). Archived from the original on 8 May 2017.
  9. ^ a b Leith, Sam (4 April 2011). "A brief history of coincidence". The Guardian. Retrieved 16 January 2024.
  10. ^ The Times (London), Friday, 7 July 1893, p. 5.
  11. ^ "When Charlie Chaplin Entered a Chaplin Look-Alike Contest and Came in 20th Place". Open Culture. June 21, 2016. Retrieved 18 January 2023.
  12. ^ "Fifty Years of Falling: Meeting the Most Prolific Stuntman of All Time". Vice magazine. 11 February 2016.
  13. ^ Lucy Rock (January 29, 2006). "From Nobody Much to Someone Special". The Observer. Retrieved 3 September 2010.
  14. ^ "Dolly Parton Explains How She Lost Dolly Parton Look-a-Like Contest (VIDEO)". Aoltv.com. Retrieved 2012-12-28.
  15. ^ Adams, James (2014-05-02). "'If you trimmed your hair, you'd look just like this Obama guy'". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 2022-12-16.
  16. ^ "Can you tell Bernard Drainville and Bertrand St-Arnaud apart?". CBC News. April 3, 2014.
  17. ^ Leibowitz, Ben. "Celebrity Doppelgangers for NBA Stars". Bleacher Report. Retrieved 2022-04-17. Kidding aside, Andrew Bynum and Tracy Morgan look extremely alike. It's almost as if Morgan could be Bynum's long-lost father.
  18. ^ "Tracy Morgan Plays for the Lakers?!?". TMZ. 4 June 2009. Retrieved 2022-04-17.
  19. ^ Riding, Alan (2001-02-20). "Undaunted By the Legend; A Young Actress Finds the Spirit Of Anne Frank in a New Mini-Series". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  20. ^ Bolesław Prus, Pharaoh, translated from the Polish by Christopher Kasparek, 2nd, revised ed., Warsaw, Polestar Publications, ISBN 83-88177-01-X, and New York, Hippocrene Books, 2001.
  21. ^ Private Eye#Regular sections
  22. ^ Martin Scorsese Presents Masterpieces of Polish Cinema [1]
  23. ^ Buchanan, Jason. "Keira Knightley". MSN Movies. Archived from the original on 15 March 2009. Retrieved 17 March 2006.
  24. ^ "Svenalike.co.uk". Svenalike.co.uk. 2005-08-25. Retrieved 2012-12-28.