Oh, good one, I forgot about them!
“Cutting and pasting” will do a great job replacing one face with another (and one voice with another), but it won’t make the star actor the one delivering the lines and body language, it’s still the double acting, which is either good enough for the purpose or you need to take additional steps.
Certainly cut and paste is as much of gimmick as split screen. But CGI allows the construction of the scenes without traditional split screen techniques like using a fire pole as mentioned above. Add green screen technology in and twin scenes are fairly easy to construct, but it remains a challenge for the actors who end up doing at least twice the work as their fellow singleton characters.
Also in that movie were Jill and Jacqueline Hennessy; identical twins playing identical twin escorts. Jacqueline has not done much acting, but (according to IMDb) appeared once as Claire Kincaid on Law & Order when Jill wasn’t available. It was a courtroom scene with Claire in the background, and she had no dialog.
That’s no minor bit of trivia for a L&O fan like me. I have to find that episode now.
It had to be difficult for the HBO show I Know This Much is True. Mark Ruffalo plays twin brothers and had to gain 30 lbs to play one of them. Must have been tough to do that for each scene.
Here is Alec Guinness playing seven roles, all relatives, in Kind Hearts and Coronets in 1949. They did multiple exposures over several days (starting at 0:31): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r-n2wZzeJk
And, in Dave, Kevin Kline played both the President and a lookalike who fills in for him for awhile (at 0:12): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTTe-rxTyh0
Here’s a scene with them together, but they don’t walk around each other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0yaRZbki6U
Just look up Jacqueline Hennessy on IMDb. I’ve seen that episode a few times, but never made a conscious effort to look for Claire in the background during trial scenes.
Jacqueline Hennessy has worked for Chatelaine magazine (a Canadian women’s magazine) for years, I believe.
The musical A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder is based on the same novel as Kind Hearts, and features the same actor playing eight roles. While they obviously don’t appear on stage at the same time, there are some quick changes. Here is a video showing the behind-the-scenes process for a couple of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_l75kLxBWI
They can always hire your look alike to play your twin -like they did in the movie ‘Twins’.
Ha!
I heard that in Terminator II they used Linda Hamilton’s identical twin, but earlier in the thread someone said they just used a camera trick.
These are not quadruplets. His earlier videos had lots of scantily clad women, so critics claimed people were watching and not listening to his music. This music video made records when it was sold, so his critics were wrong.
The most impressive pre-CGI “twinning” I ever saw (and still can’t figure out how it was done) was the Bette Midler/Lily Tomlin film “Big Business”. They played two pairs of twins that were born at the same hospital and were mixed up at birth, one pair raised poor in the country and the other pair raised in the ivory towers of New York. Of course, fate brought them all together and hilarity ensues.
I wonder if that is something actors put on their resume (special skills: SCUBA certified, horse riding, have an identical twin)
Brian
Patty and Cathy also had another identical cousin - her characteristic was “Southerness”
There was an episode of Newhart where they made a comedy pilot with Julia Duffy’s character playing twins; most of the time, one of the twins’ faces was hidden and was silent (I think Teri Polo played the double), but at one point, there is a split screen effect where you can clearly see the seam thanks to the floor’s checkerboard pattern.
The link should be right at the split screen, but if it’s not, it’s at 9:14 of the video:
I think you may have misread. It was posted that the method used in her case was to use her real-life twin rather than camera work.
Found it in a video about remastering - you can see it around the 1:36 mark.
Sounds a lot like Start the Revolution without Me. Were the Midler and Tomlin as good as Sutherland and Wilder?
BTW I’m surprised no one has mentioned the Tom Hardy film Legend in which he plays both Ronnie and Reggie Kray. Mostly split screen with some CGI smoothing but still well done.