10 great films featuring dual performances

To date, Michael B. Jordan has appeared in every Ryan Coogler film. As if to make up for only giving him a single scene in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022), Coogler’s new project, Sinners, casts Jordan in two lead roles: twin Mississippi gangsters Smoke and Stack, whose attempts to start a juke joint with bootlegging money in the Jim-Crow-era south attracts the attention of less than friendly visitors. 

Smoke and Stack spend their time on screen in a form of duet, with Jordan expertly bouncing off his own intensity and charisma to give a composite portrayal of Black men who are equally guarded, compromised and strategic as they work against violent systems. Modern film technology has made the complex task of one actor playing multiple roles, if not strictly easier, then at least more appealing a central gimmick for ambitious, stylistically-minded filmmakers. Dual performances take advantage of the unique conditions of filmmaking: the cut allows actors to occupy the same space more than once, something not available to live performers on stage.

The most well-known examples of dual performances in film skew commercially – everyone remembers Mike Myers playing hero and villain in the Austin Powers movies, or 12-year-old Lindsay Lohan dazzling as estranged sisters in The Parent Trap (1998), or Nicolas Cage depicting the full spectrum of neuroses in the Charlie Kaufman-scripted meta-comedy Adaptation (2002). To honour the arduous craft and rich history of dual performances, here are 10 great films that put them front and centre.

Brigette Helm gave dual performances as Maria and the robot in Metropolis between the ages of 17 and 19, during a taxing shoot typical of director Fritz Lang. Her breakout role is a dazzling one – she plays Maria, a young woman who is shown as a humble angel walking among the working class, and the ‘Maschinenmensch’, a humanoid robot fashioned in Maria’s image, who wants the workers to revolt against their overlords and plunge the city of Metropolis into chaos. 

Maria’s saintly nature is emphasised by wide shots of a white-clad Helm surrounded by darkly clothed urchins and clear, bright close-ups of her pristine face. By contrast, the devilish robot performs a hypnotic erotic dance that drives male onlookers into a frenzy – an unsubtle metaphor for the danger underpinning Weimar decadence. Iffy gender politics aside (Lang has his young actress perform both extremes of the Madonna-whore complex), the bold, rich range of Helm’s debut has stunned for nearly 100 years.

Brats is the first of three Laurel and Hardy shorts where the British and American comic dynamos play dual roles – here, they play their own children. While their wives are out for the evening, Stan and Ollie struggle to get each of their sons (who are exact copies of them in miniature) to peacefully go to bed. Each of the sets have been replicated with gigantic proportions whenever the ‘brat’ Laurel and Hardy (who doesn’t have his dad’s moustache) are on screen. 

The charm of Brats’ brief runtime is that, outside of the slapstick and supersized set clambering, both sets of Laurel and Hardy mirror each other’s immaturity and cluelessness – the fact that the parents try to act with authority and sophistication only emphasises how much they have in common with their kids – an inner child manifest as literal offspring. One of the few Laurel and Hardy shorts where they are the only actors, Brats gives a magnified look into their chaotic comedic sensibilities.

Lee Marvin is the only actor on this list who won an Oscar for his dual performance. Marvin gives an iconic turn as Kid Shelleen, a washed-up gunslinger, and Tim Strawn, a tin-nosed killer closing in on the father of schoolteacher-turned-outlaw Cat Ballou (Jane Fonda). By this point in his career, Marvin had appeared in John Ford, Don Seigel, and Budd Boetticher westerns, and had developed a low-key reputation for playing serious tough guys like in The Big Heat (1953) and Bad Day at Black Rock (1955). 

Marvin was an obvious choice for the scratchy-voiced, menacing Strawn, but the hired killer only feels so sinister because Shelleen is such a hysterical mess: riding a drunken horse, a stammering, anxious wreck (not to mention a terrible shot) until he has a swig of whiskey. A generous psychoanalytical interpretation of Cat Ballou would note how Shelleen has to purge his faults and addictions so he can defeat his dark, stone-cold other half.

The late Masahiro Shinoda spent his career piercing the social taboos baked into Japanese history, and with his adaptation of an 18th century ‘bunraku’ (a traditional Japanese play performed with puppets), Shinoda enhances the artificiality (and thus the senselessness) of the story of a meek paper merchant and the courtesan he’s in love with. Aided by ‘kuroko’ stagehands who appear in scenes to amplify the stakes and melodrama, the actors feel increasingly trapped by internalised duty and self-destructive drives. 

With actress Shima Iwashita playing both the merchant’s courtesan lover and his long-suffering wife, Double Suicide weaves a bitter and fraught tapestry of feeling trapped by societal bonds of dependence. The characters occupy a world where social stability must come at the expense of rejecting those beneath you, and Iwashita’s compassionate, urgent performances compliment each other. Both women are subject to distinct but similar prisons of tradition, but only the lower status woman is destined for the titular, climactic act of violence.  

As identical twin gynaecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle, Jeremy Irons channels smug competitiveness, dangerous charisma, and the agony of withdrawal – and must do it twice as much as every other David Cronenberg lead. The standard Cronenbergian desire to release a deluge of ecstasy and agony (while naively certain that you can handle it) is doubled and countered by each protagonist. They feed each other’s worst tendencies and threaten to smother their shared lover Cary (Heidi von Palleske) as they act out, in the real world, the medical myth of a foetus eating its twin inside the womb. 

The legacy of Cronenberg’s film led to a gender-swapped miniseries with the unimpeachable Rachel Weisz as Beverly and Elliot, but the film version meditates on a failed life with unique, lingering power. Beverly and Elliot sink into self-hating lethargy as Dead Ringers drives towards its inevitable, melancholy conclusion, and it’s excruciating thanks to the eerie and sensitive manner with which one Irons tends to another.

Although this film softens the political clarity and boldness of Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s previous work (Dekalog, Blind Chance, Camera Buff), the twin settings of the dreamlike doppelgänger drama – post-Communist Poland and Paris as the embodiment of European modernity – invites an interpretation about a director who was reportedly done with Polish politics (although he would return to Polish-France relations in Three Colours: White). 

Irène Jacob plays both Weronika, a fledgling singer whose life is cut short by illness, and Véronique, a modern Parisian woman unaware of her metaphysical, cross-border bonds. The two women do not share the screen: as we don’t meet Véronique until after Weronika dies, there’s a strange and tragic linearity to the titular character’s story, which Jacob realises with acute shock and sadness when she learns the truth behind her existence. Jacob is the conduit for Kieślowski’s opaque but piercing reflection on our relation to the universe: how overwhelming would it be to uncover a mystery that we don’t have the language to solve?

At the 2013 Toronto Film Festival, Enemy screened alongside the mainstream, propulsive Prisoners – since then, director Denis Villeneuve hasn’t touched the tightly-wound eeriness of this Canadian-shot thriller. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Adam, an exhausted professor who discovers his exact double, Anthony, is a local actor playing bit parts in crummy movies. As both Torontonians, Gyllenhaal covers a spectrum of masculine anxiety and sexual insecurity, with each twin hyper-aware of the ways each other is living and behaving in ways they can’t. 

In a filmography full of frustrated, impotent men, Villeneuve’s dual use of Gyllenhaal stands out as an invasive and thorough look at the inseparability of masculine desire and ego. Before his Travis Bickle-fication in Nightcrawler, Gyllenhaal tapped into the tension and danger hiding behind urban malaise with verve and self-destructive aggression: Villeneuve’s treatise on modern identity could be described as a man cuckolding himself, all the while denying his clear fragility.

The only sequel on this list, with Michael Fassbender in Alien: Covenant the rare case of an actor playing two characters after debuting one in an earlier film. At the end of Prometheus (2012), the advanced Weyland-Yutani android David sails into space with Elizabeth Shaw to search for existential answers. When the ill-prepared colonists touch down on Planet 4 in the miserable, nasty sequel Covenant, David has adopted the role of Victor Frankenstein, designing the perfect organism to spite the limitations built into him by his human creators.

Among the colonists is Walter, a deradicalised update of the David model, now sporting an American accent and a workmanlike ethos (his name is a homage to Alien producer Walter Hill). Walter’s exposure to the bitter, unmoderated contradictions of his older cousin is charged with philosophic possibility and an erotic desire to access a higher state of being – even if David’s superiority reduces Walter to a mere stepping stone in his xenomorphic plot.

Luca Guadagnino’s update of Suspiria has not received yet the same label of ‘classic’ as Argento’s original, but its counterintuitive rhythm has commanded a school of devout fans since its release seven years ago. Rather than keeping the reveal that a German dance school is being run by a witch coven until the final minutes, Suspiria (2018) is candid and inquisitive about the coven’s structure and tensions, with the shrewd, collected Madame Blanc (Swinton) plotting against the diseased, ancient Mother Markus (also Swinton, briefly).

Swinton also portrays the film’s German perspective, playing the elderly psychoanalyst Josef Klemperer, who suspects the witches’ violence before being forced to witness their sabbath. Using the pseudonym Lutz Ebersdorf, Swinton shuffles around a divided Germany with a thick accent, contrasting Blanc’s poise and intensity with an anxious, foggy presence, unable to grasp the clarity and power of the forces amassing power in his changing city.

It comes as no surprise that a contemporary horror with only the letters ‘US’ in its title is loaded with direct and energised commentary on American society. A number of critics have commented on the connections between Jordan Peele’s ominous horror and W. E. B. Du Bois’ concept of ‘Double Consciousness’. Both the film’s thematic heft and immediate, visceral menace are accessed through Lupita Nyong’o’s sterling dual performance as Adelaide, a mother returning with her family to the coastal site of her childhood trauma, and Red, Adelaide’s ‘tethered’ doppelgänger, fated – along with the rest of her species – to pantomime their doubles in secret subterranean societies. 

Nyong’o is an incredibly expressive actor, and seeing Adelaide’s unnerved and guarded face mirrored by Red’s wide eyes and evidently violent smile (not to mention a voice hoarse from underuse) draws out Peele’s most incisive observations about society’s refusal to meet the eye of its underclass.