Vacationing alone in Jamaica, I was partying with a local guy who kept insisting I was a dead ringer for “that American actor in the movies”. I kept throwing out names, “Clint Eastwood, Cary Grant, Charles Bronson?”, and he kept telling me, “no, not him, you know, the actor”.
We got very drunk and very high. Thinking back, I should have been guessing, “Mickey Rourke, Steve Buscemi, Joe Pesci, Marty Feldman”?
My wife and I would take our two daughters to the Comic Cons in Chicago.
At a couple of different Cons I got asked if I was Woody Harrelson. Didn’t make
my wife happy at all, since she really dislikes Woody.
I’ve been mistaken several times over the years for Jeremy Irons – guess you could say we’re Dead Ringers.
“Snack happy!”
Not a lot but sometimes total strangers would have to ask me if I was so and so’s sister because you look just like her! I would then reply Haley Mills right? Lol. Remember her?
Way back In the day my friends would claim my Mom looked exactly like Olivia Walton. Kinda but she was just as stern as Mama.
I have had long hair, short hair, various types of facial hair and been clean shaven. It doesn’t matter. Ever since I was a child I have constantly (not during the pandemic of course) been mistaken for people, told that I look exactly like someone they know, told that I look like I could be someone’s son or father or gotten the “I know you from somewhere but I can’t place it.” It would happen at least once a month and often more. It’s happened all over the world.
I’ve rarely met or seen pictures of these doppelgangers but when I have I can kind of see what they are talking about but we don’t look that much alike. Once I met one of the guys who was supposed to look like he could be my son and he said that he gets told the same thing constantly too. To complicate things, I’m kind of face blind so it’s led to some weird encounters.
Now that we all aren’t getting out much and we wear masks, I’ve been free of this for months.
I remember the Reagan presidency. There was always lots of speculation about things he did to try to look younger. There was no doubt that he dyed his hair, and there was also speculation he’d had a facelift. He was 13 years older than Carter, but Google a pic of them side by side. Reagan had been an actor, and now he was the oldest man (at the time) to seek the white house. He invested a lot in his looks.
Never seen anyone that looks like me outside my family. An uncle says I resemble my grandfather. Thanks to Ancestory.com, I met a half sister of mine last December, I resemble her more than any of my 5 other siblings. We have the same father. I use to work with a guy that was a spitting image of a brother. I showed the guy a picture of my brother, he thought I had a picture of him.
Not “a lot” of people look like me in the “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” sense, but I have a cousin who looks a lot like me, and is close to me in age. We were together pretty often as children, and people always asked us if we were twins.
We liked it. Sometimes we even dressed alike on purpose to encourage it.
As far as what’s “it” like? I don’t know if I can say. We went to the same school for a few years in elementary school, then again in high school, although she was a grade ahead (she’s eight months older: she was born in May, and I was born the following January). Our teachers and classmates could tell us apart, but other people in school called us the wrong name a lot. Somehow, I just knew when someone said her name, but meant me, and I answered. Most of the time, I didn’t correct people. Sometimes I’d turn around, and people would correct themselves, and apologize, and I’d say that it was OK. Sometimes even looking me full in the face, people couldn’t tell it was me and not her.
It didn’t mess with my sense of identity, or anything.
What did kind of mess with me was the fact that this same cousin has a younger sister who looks even more like me, although she is 15 years younger. I would take her places like the park, or the movies when she was little, and people would mistakes me for her mother. I never got used to that.
It made me really uncomfortable. I think a lot of it was the idea that people thought I’d had a baby at 15 (when I was still a virgin, and really, a little socially backward). Thing is, now when I look at pictures of myself at the time, I realize that I did look a few years older than I was, beginning about the age of 13. I was usually pegged for about three years older than I was, from about 13 to 20, but I didn’t believe it at the time.
When I was in college, there was someone in town who looked like me. I never met her, but her name was “Mary Anne.” I know this because of the number of people who called me that from behind, or a distance, then said “Sorry, I thought you were someone else.” I did meet her boyfriend once, who confirmed that we looked alike, but she was a little taller (
the whole world is taller than me), and he personally wouldn’t confuse us.
The “Mary Anne” thing was a little weird, but it was mostly because I never met her. I think if she’d been an actual person to me, it wouldn’t have been so strange. As it was, the first several times it happened, I wondered if I was sleepwalking, and introducing myself to people as Mary Anne. I watched Sally Field as Sybil at one point during college, and had this thought.
Another thing that kind of bugged me about the “Mary Anne” period was the fact that it seemed like a very gentile name. While I have not been mistaken for other specific people much, people have always been able to tell I’m Jewish-- except for the occasional person who thinks I’m Hispanic or Greek. I even had a woman once cross a busy street against traffic to accost me, and ask me about Jewish college life in town, because she’d just dropped her daughter off at school, and I was the first Jew she’d seen since she’d been in town.
People very frequently just ask me questions about local synagogues, or even speak Yiddish to me without saying something to first confirm that I’m Jewish. So, I look like a lot of people’s Socratic ideal of a Jew.
That’s been happening all my life, though; I don’t really have a “What’s it like?” answer, other than, I like it from other Jews, but it puts me on my guard when gentiles do it-- and yes, I can tell, not by how people look, but by what they say. I had my life threatened by someone in Bedford, Indiana, once, after he did no more than look at my face.
I hope that answer gets you a little closer to what you want.
Genes are weird: my brother looks nothing like either of my parents (or me, for that matter), but my father has a cousin who looks nothing like him, and my mother’s mother looks nothing like my mother; my brother, on the other hand, looks like this grandmother and my father’s cousin had a baby, which is impossible, because the first time they met was at my parent’s wedding, when the cousin was still pretty young, and my grandmother had already had a hysterectomy.
When I shave off my beard (it’s only happened twice in the last 40 years), I look like my oldest brother. There was a guy I grew up with who people thought looked just like me (they would get us mixed up). We didn’t think we looked alike, though. Also, girls went ga-ga over him and didn’t notice me.
Not me, but in high school, I was writing a paper and using a book of Robinson Jeffers poetry as one of my references. The author’s photo on the dust jacket made me do a double-take. It look just like my dad. I showed it to my mom, and she said “didn’t you know? you’re related to him.” She couldn’t remember exactly how. Turns out he was my first cousin three times removed (my great-grandmother was his first cousin; their dads were brothers).
But what I thought was odd was that my great-grandmother had twins (one of which was my grandmother), and Jeffers also had twins (boys, though). And no other twins that I could find in either family line.
Some people resemble my brother, occasionally to a striking degree.
But no one looks like me.