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For years, dual roles have been played largely for laughs. Think of Adam Sandler’s Razzie-sweeping twin turn in Jack and Jill, or Lisa Kudrow as both Phoebe and Ursula Buffay on Friends. Eddie Murphy was always particularly prolific, his most multiplicitous performance as a clutch of Klumps for Nutty Professor II.
There are exceptions, of course. But for every Legend or The Prestige there are ten Austin Powers, Bowfingers and – shudder – Norbits. This year, however, is giving us a more dramatic breed of duplicate. Robert De Niro will pull double Don duty in The Alto Knights, Michael B Jordan will play twin leads in the supernatural Sinners and a pair of Robert Pattinson clones is currently headlining Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17.
And there’s more. The Monkey just served up a horror with two bloody scoops of Theo James, Zac Efron recently wrapped A24 thriller Famous, in which he plays both stalker and superstar and, this November, Elle Fanning will play twin sisters in the latest film in the Predator franchise. Recently, at Sundance, Dylan O’Brien played his own twin brother in darkly comic drama Twinless. So, even disregarding the films’ genres, it’s still a notable spike in audiences seeing double. So why now? And how are these seemingly impossible shots realised?
“For years, film-makers have used various techniques to show actors multiple times in the same scene,” says Daniel Harrington, a London-based VFX artist and compositor. “In The Parent Trap, split-screen allowed the same actor to occupy both sides of the frame, whereas The Social Network used motion control to portray the Winklevoss twins by repeating precise camera movements.”
Before we tackle the technicalities, however, here’s a brief history of dual roles – for the concept is almost as old as cinema itself. In 1898, trailblazing director Georges Méliès was already double-exposing film to twice capture his likeness within the same frame. His method made the jump to feature-length films in 1917 when actor William Farnum played opposite himself in an adaptation of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.
The following year, Mary Pickford took dual roles in Stella Maris using a new split-screen technique that would continue to be used for decades, in films such as Dead Ringers, Adaptation and Jean-Claude Van Damme’s as-good-as-it-sounds Double Impact. The Alto Knights, over a century later, even uses a similar technique to double up De Niro in select scenes.
But today, split-screening is just one of many tools in the dual role toy box. The most notable advancement in the field came about in 1989, with the release of Back to the Future Part II and director Robert Zemeckis’ commissioning of Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) to create the VistaGlide, a robotic, motion-controlled camera dolly system that would allow film-makers to capture multiple split-screen performances while also moving their cameras.
This remains the most popular dual role method, says Harrington. Several mattes (the individual shots that make up a final frame) are filmed with the same actor playing their separate parts. This footage is then delivered to rotoscope and paint artists, who tidy up the edges of the raw mattes before tasking compositors with piecing them together into one seamless whole.
“Ultimately, the success of the illusion depends on the synergy between on-set preparation and post-production artistry,” says Harrington. “Digital effects may be increasingly sophisticated, but they’re still most effective when built on a strong practical foundation. So, on set, consistent lighting, precise framing and stand-ins are crucial for ensuring seamless compositing later. Without these elements, even the most advanced digital tools would struggle to create a convincing result. It’s teamwork, exemplified not only by film, but by TV series such as Orphan Black.”
The small screen has indeed reaped the rewards of these technical advancements – 2025 will also see Netflix debut twin Jamie Dornans in The Undertow and twin Anna Camps in the final season of You. Malachi Kirby will double up for Anansi Boys on Prime Video, and Cynthia Erivo will play identical sextuplets when Rian Johnson’s Poker Face returns to Peacock. “And, while no breakthrough is solely responsible [for this increase in dual roles],” says Harrington, “recent developments in AI-driven deepfakes and performance cloning have significantly lowered costs and sped up production times”.
This deepfake method of replacing faces (Robert Pattinson’s visage was digitally transplanted onto a stand-in for Mickey 17) was another ILM contrivance, originally developed for 1993’s Jurassic Park. Oscar-nominated VFX supervisor Theo Jones works at Framestore, the studio which worked on much of Joon-ho’s latest offering. And, while Jones doesn’t believe there’s a single catalyst for the current spate of dual role projects – “it’s likely some sort of happy accident,” he says, “the same way you might get two films about an asteroid hurtling towards Earth landing at the box office at the same time” – he also brings up the rise in deepfake technology.
“It wasn’t an option 10, maybe even five years ago,” says Jones. “But even this isn’t perfect for a dual role – you still need to find someone with similar features and proportions, and the baseline performance would be coming from the stand-in rather than your actor. Plus, ‘off-the-peg’ deepfake technology certainly isn’t up to Imax quality at the moment, so you’d still need plenty of VFX work to make it look believable.”
Framestore, Jones reveals, has developed its own “neural face rendering tech” – called Facade – which he believes will set a new standard in the industry. “But, for purely dramatic moments,” he adds, “something like Lupita Nyong’o’s incredible performance in Us, you’d be far better placed using practical techniques for the shoot, and post-production fixes to make the finished picture seamless. Sometimes, this will involve rewriting the VFX rulebook – other times, it will mean using techniques that existed before computers were ever a part of film-making.”
It’s the perfect way to approach the art of the dual role. For, whether it’s actors attracted by the creative challenge or film-makers hoping to advance the technical side of their craft, these twin turns have always been collaborative efforts. By continuing to blend techniques new and old, audiences are not only guaranteed evermore envelope-pushing performances, but the entire concept of the dual role will stay true to its innately patchwork nature.
