This year at the movies, you’d be forgiven for thinking you are seeing double — because you are. Since March there have been three films featuring stars acting opposite themselves. “Mickey 17” has two versions (at least) of Robert Pattinson as an expendable working grunt on an alien planet in a futuristic world. Robert De Niro played two different mobsters in “The Alto Knights.” And Michael B. Jordan just made his doubles debut as swaggering twins in Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” a vampire movie set in 1930s Mississippi.
Having the same actor appear two — or sometimes three or four or more — times onscreen is one of cinema’s most enduring tricks. And while the effect has long been a powerful bit of movie magic, the technology has evolved over the years. Here are some of the landmarks.
‘The Playhouse’ (1921)
An In-Camera Method to Buster Keaton’s Madness
The use of doubling goes all the way back to the silent era in this Buster Keaton short in which the protagonist, played by the prodigious physical comedian, dreams himself as every single person in a show — from the band to the audience members. (He also appears in blackface as a minstrel, an upsetting byproduct of the era.) How did Keaton accomplish this? Through masking and double exposure. He and his cameraman Elgin Lessley would cover part of the lens, perform a beat, and then rewind, uncovering the previously masked portion to add another version of himself to the shot. The effect is a wondrous confluence of Keatons all acting at once.
‘The Parent Trap’ (1961)
Split-Screen High Jinks
In many ways, Disney’s 1961 caper remains the go-to example of doubling an actor. Hayley Mills plays a pair of twins who conspire to get their divorced parents back together. The split-screen technique sounds almost quaint these days. Mills would perform the scene as one twin opposite her double and then switch clothes and do it all again as the other twin. The camera would have to remain perfectly stable, and nothing on set could be altered between takes. Mills also could not reach out to her scene partner. “When we were shooting a scene, on pain of death did you cross over the dividing line,” Mills later told Vulture. After shooting, the two strips of film were fed into what was called an optical printer and rephotographed with mattes, which blocked out the sides that didn’t feature Mills so that they could be combined.
‘Back to the Future Part II’ (1989)
Crossing the Line
The cinematographer Dean Cundey remembered seeing “The Parent Trap” as a child and figuring out the trick. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s intriguing but they don’t ever cross the line,’” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “I bet the way they did that was they put two pieces together down the middle.” Though Cundey would later shoot Nancy Meyers’s 1998 remake of “The Parent Trap,” he helped solve the problem on “Back to the Future Part II,” Robert Zemeckis’s sequel to the time travel hit that features actors playing their characters’ ancestors and descendants. The solution? The VistaGlide motion control dolly system, developed by the visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic. The technology meant that Cundey could shoot a scene as he normally would, without keeping the camera in a fixed position, and then the computerized dolly would be able to repeat that exactly for the next take when Michael J. Fox would change clothes to play Marty McFly’s son, for instance.
Motion control also figured into the sequence in which an old Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) hands his younger self a sports almanac as part of a ploy to get rich in the future. While Cundey explained they could have simply had Wilson pass the book out of frame, instead they put it on a motion-controlled robotic arm. “He would hold the book in one hand and follow across, and then we would cut and he would go get made up and the book would come across and he would grab it and take it,” Cundey said, adding, “We went the extra step to develop the motion-control arm that passed the book and it never left the audience’s sight. Those are the kind of shots that are interesting because they just tell the story.”
‘Multiplicity’ (1996)
Following the Feet
In Harold Ramis’s comedy, Michael Keaton plays an exasperated family man who clones himself so he can get more done. Eventually there are four Michael Keatons onscreen, each with a vastly different personality. The visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund quickly figured that one of the main challenges would be making sure Keaton was making eye contact with himself when the clones were interacting. So Edlund devised a contraption that was essentially a tripod affixed with a pistol scope and a laser that could send information to a computer. For the first take, an operator would use it to follow Keaton’s feet. On the second take, Keaton would act opposite a stand-in who would hold a monitor that played Keaton’s first take and stand over a laser dot that played back the movements Edlund’s device had captured. “Michael would be talking to the monitor in sync and he had a hearing aid off screen on the other side so you never saw it,” Edlund said in an interview. When Keaton had to cross in front of himself, they used pieces of green screen on the set. Meanwhile, throughout production, a team was stationed in a trailer creating composites of the takes so Ramis could get a sense of what the final product would look like.
‘The Social Network’ (2010)
Facebook Face Swap
“I’m 6’5, 220 and there’s two of me.” That line spoken by Armie Hammer as one of the Winklevoss twins in David Fincher’s “The Social Network” is also indicative of what Fincher had to accomplish in the film to bring the imposing Harvard bros to life. Instead of casting actual twins, Fincher chose Hammer and another actor, Josh Pence. But Pence’s face is never seen onscreen. Instead, Fincher scanned Hammer and Pence’s visages with a medical-grade laser and digitally replaced Pence’s face with Hammer’s. “It was really motion-capture acting in a way,” Pence told The Huffington Post in 2020.
‘Sinners’ (2025)
A Cigarette Pass and a Camera ‘Halo’
On “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler not only wanted to turn Michael B. Jordan into Depression-era twins named Smoke and Stack, he wanted to do so on 65-millimeter IMAX film. “There are a lot of extra challenges that come with the 65-millimeter film,” the visual effects supervisor Michael Ralla said. “Not only is it the resolution — how big the negative is — but with that there’s interesting challenges where the film is warping as it’s being pulled through the camera, and then it’s being pulled through the scanner again. Compared to digital photography where you have a perfectly stable frame, there’s a lot of movement that we need to make sure is consistent across the frame.”
The filmmakers developed what Ralla and the visual effects producer James Alexander called a matrix to decide how exactly they were going to double Jordan for each particular moment. In some cases that meant simple over the shoulder shots, in others it meant using a techno dolly, essentially a more advanced version of the VistaGlide. Their standout innovation was what they called the halo. It’s a rig that sat on Jordan’s shoulders with 12 cameras that could capture anything he did with his head. They could then use those images to replace a double’s noggin with Jordan’s.
Still, one of the most impressive moments of twinning in the movie is all Jordan. Early in the film, Stack hands Smoke a cigarette. Jordan intensely rehearsed the moves of both characters with a body double, and then would swap places during the shoot. “We had a little pole that would show where the cigarette handover had to happen,” Ralla said. “They knew how to touch that pole that was digitally removed later and the two were combined.”
The action took a long time to get right, but Ralla said it was worth it because of how it shows Jordan’s characterization of the twins. “All the body movement, all the mannerisms, all the body language is established so well already and we weren’t able to see it during the shoot yet,” Ralla said.
Videos: Joseph M. Schenck Productions (“The Playhouse”); Disney (“The Parent Trap”); Universal Pictures (“Crossing the Line”); Columbia Pictures (“Multiplicity”); Columbia Pictures (“The Social Network”); Warner Bros. (“Sinners”)
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