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Look-alike

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File:Chris Coons and Olaf Scholz 2024.jpg
US Senator Chris Coons (left), German Chancellor Olaf Scholz<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

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.

File:Lookalikes of J. Stalin and V. Lenin posing with tourists.jpg
Stalin and Lenin look-alikes with tourists

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.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

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

ResearchEdit

File:Recruitment and objective determination of look-alike human pairs.jpg
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.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

With the advent of social media, there have been several reported cases of people finding their "twin stranger" online.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref name=":1">Template:Cite news</ref> 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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Template:Cite AV media</ref>

Notable look-alikesEdit

  • 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.<ref name="gu">Template:Cite news</ref> 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.<ref name="gu"/> 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.
File:Tsar Nicholas II & King George V.JPG
Nicholas II (left), George V in 1913
  • The United Kingdom's King George V (1865–1936) and Russia's Tsar Nicholas 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 to The Times of London, the crowd may have mistaken Nicholas for George due to their similar beards and attire.<ref>The Times (London), Friday, 7 July 1893, p. 5.</ref>
  • An urban legend claims that Charlie Chaplin entered one of the many Chaplin look-alike contests and lost.<ref name="OpenCulture">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web }}</ref> It is retold in the musical Chaplin.

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  • When Uffe Ellemann-Jensen was Denmark's foreign minister, he was often compared to Danish pop singer Johnny Reimar.Template:Citation needed
  • 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.Template:Full citation needed
  • 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.
  • Armando Iannucci's Friday Night Armistice (1996–98) featured "the bus of Dianas", a bus full of Princess Diana (1961-1997) look-alikes which was dispatched to "care" at the sites of various minor tragedies.
  • 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.Template:Citation needed 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".<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web }}</ref>

  • 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."Template:Citation needed
  • Dolly Parton has stated that she lost a 'Dolly Parton Look-Alike Contest'.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web }}</ref>

  • 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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • 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 Michael 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.Template:Full citation needed
  • Howard X is a professional impersonator who looks like the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.
  • Former basketball player Andrew Bynum has famously been compared to actor Tracy Morgan<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

  • Suzie Kennedy is a British impersonator who looks like the actress Marilyn Monroe, and in 2020 impersonated her on America's Got Talent.
  • 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.Template:Citation needed

Fictional look-alikesEdit

LiteratureEdit

FilmEdit

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  • 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."
  • The Devil's Double (2011) dramatised Latif Yahia's claim to have been Uday Hussein's double.
  • The Dictator (2012): A political satire black comedy film starring Sacha Baron Cohen both as a tyrannical yet childish despot and as a dimwitted political decoy.
  • 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.
  • The Scapegoat (2012) is a remake of the 1959 Alec Guinness film, starring Matthew Rhys.
  • 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.

TelevisionEdit

  • 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 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.

MusicalsEdit

Video gamesEdit

  • 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.

See alsoEdit

NotesEdit

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