Just think, if Twisters had come out this year instead of 2024, we’d be inundated with memes of Brandon Perea’s “We got twins! Twiiiiiiins!!!”
There was a surprising trend to crop up throughout the genre movies of 2025: actors doing dual roles. Robert Pattinson played two (well, 17) versions of himself in Mickey 17, Michael B. Jordan pulled double duty as Smoke and Stack in Sinners, ditto David Corenswet in Superman as Clark Kent and the evil-ish clone version of himself, Ultraman. Frankenstein had Mia Goth as the titular character’s mother, Claire, and his love interest, Elizabeth Lavenza; Christian Convery and Theo James were the respective young and adult versions of Bill and Hal Shelburn in The Monkey; and Predator: Badlands‘ two leads, Dimitrius Schuster-Kolomatangi and Elle Fanning, played protagonists Dek and Thia as well as their evil family members, Njohrr and Tessa. (Schuster-Kolomatangi, while doing both the physical and voice performance for Dek, only provided the voice for his character’s father.)
© Warner Bros.A single actor doing multiple performances is as recurring a trend as playing against type or using costuming and makeup to be virtually unrecognizable, and often overlaps with both. For ’90s kids, our first time seeing this filmmaking technique was probably Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap—given the Olsen Twins existing around the same timeframe, some of us probably thought Lohan had a twin—or Michael Myers in the Austin Powers movies. Whether you know it’s happening or not, it’s an impressive feat, particularly when it comes to blockbusters, where works like Us and Cloud Atlas have made entire meals out of this technique.
Marketing-wise, these films all pitched these performances differently to audiences. Going into Mickey or Sinners, you knew that you’d be seeing a recognizable actor play the main character(s). It couldn’t help but be a selling point, since who wouldn’t want to see Jordan as twin gangsters in the ’30s or Pattinson portray a cynical sociopath and a pathetic wimp? Other instances, it was a nice little surprise; many likely watched Frankenstein without knowing Goth was Claire, and Superman hid that Corenswet was playing Ultraman up until its last 20 minutes. One of the first things we learned about Badlands was it’d have Fanning as two characters, but while Thia was all over the marketing, Tessa wasn’t, or at least not as much.
And what did these multiple performances bring to their individual films onscreen? The general answer is a thematic depth that couldn’t be as easily found by having another person play the second part. Predator: Badlands uses its pair of dual roles to show the worst idea of what Dek and Thia could become; the Shelburn twins in The Monkey represent how the specter of death can loom over our lives and put you in different forms of arrested development. In Goth, Frankenstein explores Victor’s fixation on the cycle of life and wanting a woman to love him in the way his mother did in his youth, which is then passed on down to his Creature. And Mickey 17, despite how slapstick and goofy most of it is, is angry about how capitalism chews up its workers and spits them out to the point of creating similar, but different people each time.
© NeonOf them all, Sinners and Superman are more meta with their double roles. Director/writer Ryan Coogler knows he can’t put two Jordans on screen and not have them fight each other or make one a vampire, so he does that. That Superman makes its final one-on-one fight be between the more familiar version of the titular hero and an evil clone who doesn’t speak or have much of a personality beyond being a glowering lunk isn’t an accident, given James Gunn’s stated intent of rehabilitating Superman’s cinematic image. Whether or not it’s a coincidence that an unmasked Ultraman also looks like an askance Henry Cavill, with his longer, curled hair, is something to determine for yourself, though we’ll have to wait and see whether Ultraman was used as a one-and-done baddie or if he was a stepping stone for Corenswet to play Bizarro in a later Superman film.
Which of these movies does it best is up to personal taste, but it was a fun little discovery to see the year populated by movies that loved getting multiple performances out of their actors. Most of these films were financially or critically successful in some way, so it’s possible there’ll be more of them in the years to come, and if that’s the case, it’ll be interesting to see what stars take the plunge and play opposite against themselves.
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