Look-alike


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

Research

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.
With the advent of social media, there have been several reported cases of people finding their "twin stranger" online. 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.
Since 2000, photographer François Brunelle has documented look-alikes worldwide.

Notable look-alikes

Fictional look-alikes

Literature

Film

Television

  • Several episodes of Adventures of Superman 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 starred Duke in a dual role as "identical cousins".
  • In the ABC television series The Double Life of Henry Phyfe, 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", 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 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, 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, doppelgängers were an important arc in the story. The female lead character, Elena Gilbert, 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, 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, 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, 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. 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", 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

Video games