A look-alike, double, or doppelgänger 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.
Close physical resemblance between two or more individuals is also a common
plot point in works of
fiction.
Notable look-alikes
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.[3]
An urban legend claims that
Charlie Chaplin entered one of the many Chaplin look-alike contests and lost.[4] 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 crewmembers on set were constantly mistaking him for Ford.[5]
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".[6]
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'.[7]
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.[8]
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 antipathy toward Bonforte's policies. In studying the man to perfect his imposture, Smith eventually comes to admire Bonforte. He continues this performance through an election and, when Bonforte dies, the subsequent tenure in office as "Supreme Minister." This story parallels that of the film Dave, but in this case when the actual politician dies, and Bonforte's staff begins to suggest shifts in policy contrary to Bonforte's beliefs, Smith refuses to submit to their desires, removes them from their positions, and 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
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.[14][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.
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.[16]
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.
Enemy (2013): a college professor discovers look-alike actor
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 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, it is revealed that the president of Zheng Fa (a fictional country) had its president killed 12 years prior. The president encountered by the protagonists in the first episode, as is not revealed until the 5th one, was ultimately a body double.
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.
^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.