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.
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
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
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.
In the 1970s, actor-comedian Richard M. Dixon (born James LaRoe), look-alike to then-President Richard Nixon, gained some celebrity, portraying the president in the films, Richard (1972) and The Faking of the President (1976). He also appeared in director Woody Allen's initially unreleased short filmMen of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story (1971).
British stuntman Vic Armstrong acted as Harrison Ford's body double in all the films of the original Indiana Jones trilogy. Reportedly, Armstrong looked so much like Harrison Ford that the crew members on set were constantly mistaking him for Ford.[12]
Saddam Hussein allegedly employed several look-alikes for political purposes during his Iraq reign. According to a CBS 60 Minutes segment in late January 2008, Saddam Hussein denied to an American interrogator that he had employed doubles.
The BBC comedy programme Doubletake made extensive use of look-alikes playing their doubles in apparently embarrassing situations, seen through CCTV 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 of Microsoft's Bill Gates, came to attention when he attempted to trademark "Microsortof", and subsequently acted in Microsoft commercials. He appeared as Gates in the films Nothing So Strange (2002) and The Social Network (2010).
UK Celebrity Big Brother contestant Chantelle Houghton worked briefly and unsuccessfully for a look-alike agency as a Paris Hilton look-alike, earning the nickname "Paris Travelodge". By the time Chantelle Houghton won series 4 of Celebrity 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]
UK Richard and Judy ran a competition for Little Britain Lookalikes in 2005. After the live final broadcast on Friday, 28 January 2005, on Channel 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 to Bronx native Louis Ortiz his striking resemblance to then-presidential-candidate Barack Obama. Ortiz, initially as a money-making venture, sought gigs as an Obama impersonator. Ryan Murdock produced a documentary film about Ortiz's experiences, Bronx Obama.[15]
Larissa Tudor looked strikingly similar to former Grand 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 leader Kim Jong-Un.
Two baseball players, both called Brady 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.
In Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novellaThe Double (1846), an insecure, gauche government clerk in St. 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 play The 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.
In Robert Heinlein's novel Double 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.
In Daphne du Maurier's novel The 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.
In Richard Powell's novel Don Quixote, U.S.A. (1966), Arthur Peabody Goodpasture, an inept Peace 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) by Colin Forbes is a secret history thriller whose plot is based on the assumption that Adolf Hitler was assassinated in 1943, a bomb completely destroying his body. The Nazi hierarchy kept this as a top secret and got a double to impersonate Hitler, and it was this double who led Nazi Germany until its final demise in 1945.
In Clive Cussler's 1984 novel Deep Six, a double is used after the U.S. president is kidnapped by Korean and Soviet agents.
In David Lodge's 1984 novel Small World, the protagonist keeps running into two women, Angelica and Lily, who are identical twin sisters with confusingly different personalities.
In Neil Gaiman's novel Coraline (2002) the heroine meets up with improved look-alikes of her parents and all her neighbors when she enters the Other Mother's world.
José Saramago's 2002 novel The 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.
In Tana French's 2008 novel, The Likeness, detective Cassie Maddox has doppelgänger Lexie Madison who adopts the same alias Maddox used in an undercover investigation.
In Christopher Golden's novel Dead Ringers (2015) the main characters find themselves invaded by people exactly like them, but "better" or with malicious intent.
In Britain's Private Eye magazine, a long-running satirical feature of the letters section intentionally reversed the captions on look-alike photographs.[21][circular reference]
In A.M. Kherbash's novel Lesath (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 film The 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 man George M. Cohan.
The 1940 comedy film The Great Dictator was Charlie Chaplin's first talkie and his most commercially successful film. Chaplin plays both "Adenoid Hynkel" (a satirized Adolf Hitler) and a Jewish 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 to antisemitism and a return to democracy.
Angel on My Shoulder (1946): The Devil persuades a deceased gangster, played by Paul 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 the James Bond film Thunderball (1965), French NATO pilot François Derval is murdered by Angelo, a SPECTRE 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 two atom bombs.
In The Double Man (1967) an American CIA agent (Yul Brynner) is lured to Austria, so that an East German lookalike can take his place.
In the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film Where Eagles Dare (1968), set in the winter of 1943–44, a U.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.
In Gentlemen 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: 1975 Woody Allen satire on 19th-century Russian novels, set during the 1812 French invasion of Russia. A coward, Boris Grushenko (Allen), and his wife Sonja (Diane Keaton) decide to assassinate Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. A double of the Emperor is killed, and Allen's character is executed.
In The Eagle Has Landed (1976), based on Jack Higgins's novel, German paratroopers attempt in 1943 to abduct Prime Minister Winston Churchill from an English village. It is revealed that it is actually a political decoy who visits the village and is assassinated.
Joseph Losey's 1976 film Mr. Klein stars Alain 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.
In Foul Play (1978), starring Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase, the twin of an American archbishop kills the archbishop, impersonates him, and plots to assassinate a fictitious Pope Pius XIII.
Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha (1980): the warlord Takeda 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 a kagemusha (shadow warrior) and learns the role of daimyō Shingen, who is subsequently killed by an enemy sniper. The false identity of the kagemusha is revealed when he is unable to ride Lord Shingen's favorite horse; but in the final battle at Nagashino the kagemusha accepts his role and fights as the last man holding the banner of the Takeda clan.
The film Double Trouble (1984) features comedian duo Bud Spencer and Terence Hill playing two billionaires who, fearing for their lives after several assassination attempts, hire two look-alikes.
In a feature-length episode of the British sitcomOnly Fools and Horses entitled "Miami Twice", Derek is mistaken for a Mafia 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 by David Jason.
In Ringo Lam's 1996 Maximum Risk, Jean-Claude Van Damme is a French policeman who discovers that a man who has been killed by the Russian 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 film Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace features Queen Amidala of Naboo, whose planet is in crisis due to its illegal occupation by the Trade Federation. Near the conclusion of the film it is revealed that the "queen" (Keira Knightley) is in fact merely a handmaiden being used as a decoy, and Padmé (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 film Bowfinger 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 since Reagan."
Masquerade (2012): South Korean historical film starring Lee Byung-hun in dual roles as the bizarre King Gwanghae and the humble acrobat Ha-sun, who stands in for the King when he faces the threat of being poisoned.
Denis Villeneuve's Enemy (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.
Television
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 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.
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 SnakeMcDonnell 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 ColonelRoy 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
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.
^Drenon, Brandon (2024-02-09). "US Senator Chris Coons finds doppelganger in German Chancellor Olaf Scholz". Retrieved 2024-04-01.
^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.
^"Look-alike humans identified by facial recognition algorithms show genetic similarities". Cell Reports.
^"Doppelgängers Don't Just Look Alike—They Also Share DNA". Smithsonian magazine.
^Contrera, Jessica (21 April 2015). "How to find your doppelganger on Facebook". The Washington Post. Retrieved 8 January 2021.
^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.
^"Twin Strangers Exist". twinstrangers.net. Archived from the original on 2017-05-21. Retrieved 2017-05-23.
^Geaney, Niamh (20 November 2015). Niamh meets her THIRD doppelgänger (YouTube video). Archived from the original on 8 May 2017.
^ a bLeith, Sam (4 April 2011). "A brief history of coincidence". The Guardian. Retrieved 16 January 2024.
^The Times (London), Friday, 7 July 1893, p. 5.
^"When Charlie Chaplin Entered a Chaplin Look-Alike Contest and Came in 20th Place". Open Culture. June 21, 2016. Retrieved 18 January 2023.
^"Fifty Years of Falling: Meeting the Most Prolific Stuntman of All Time". Vice magazine. 11 February 2016.
^Lucy Rock (January 29, 2006). "From Nobody Much to Someone Special". The Observer. Retrieved 3 September 2010.
^"Dolly Parton Explains How She Lost Dolly Parton Look-a-Like Contest (VIDEO)". Aoltv.com. Retrieved 2012-12-28.
^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.
^"Can you tell Bernard Drainville and Bertrand St-Arnaud apart?". CBC News. April 3, 2014.
^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.
^"Tracy Morgan Plays for the Lakers?!?". TMZ. 4 June 2009. Retrieved 2022-04-17.
^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.
