Double Duty: Actors Who’ve Played Identical Twins

Dormer plays Sara Price (left), an American woman who travels to a haunted Japanese forest to find for her twin sister Jess (right), who has gone missing. She’s forced to wade through a woodland full of tormented souls during her emotionally charged quest. (Photo: Gramercy Pictures/ James Dittiger)

Much has been made about Tom Hardy’s fight scenes in Legend, in which he essentially bouts with himself. In the film, he plays identical twin brothers, the notorious London gangsters Ronald and Reginald Kray. He filmed opposite a stunt double who really punched Hardy hard! (Photo: Everett Collection)

Spike Jonze’s Oscar-winning 2002 film memorably blends fiction and reality. Cage plays Charlie Kaufman (also the film’s screenwriter) as he struggles to adapt Susan Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief into a screenplay. Kaufman’s fictional twin brother appears in the film, also played by Cage. To add to the oddity of it all, Donald Kaufman, who doesn’t actually exist, also has screenwriting credit for the film. (Photo: Everett Collection)

Who can forget Hammer in his breakout role in 2010’s Oscar-winning film The Social Network. He played the social elite Winklevoss twins — Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard classmates who went on to sue him over the founding of Facebook. (Photo: Columbia Pictures)

Arguably the most famous movie where in one actress plays the role of two twins, Mills portrays a set of identical sisters separated at birth who later scheme — and sing! — in order to reunite their divorced parents. (Photo: Everett Collection)

This 1998 remake marks Lohan’s breakout roles. Dennis Quaid and Natasha Richardson play the divorced parents Lohan’s twin characters try to reunite. (Photo: Everett Collection)

Two sets of twins is always better than one, especially when they’re played by Tomlin and Midler — who portray a pair of identical sisters who get mismatched at birth in this 1988 comedy. (Photo: Everett Collection)

Big Business filmmakers may have gotten their idea from this 1970 historical comedy, also about a pair of mismatched twins. The big difference with this one: It’s set during the eve of the French Revolution. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

Instead of twins separated at birth, Van Damme plays a set of identical siblings who part after the death of their parents in this 1991 action flick. They lead separate lives until reuniting to avenge the murder of their mother and father. (Photo: Everett Collection)

Hey, if Van Damme can do it, so can Chan — who played identical twins in this 1992 action comedy. The brothers are separated at birth and eventually each gets mistaken for the other, causing a crescendo of wacky confusion. (Photo: Dimension Films)

This 2011 comedy bomb is our one exception to the identical twin rule: Sandler plays dueling roles of both family man Jack and his needy, passive-aggressive fraternal twin Jill. (Photo: Columbia Pictures)

The plot of this 1946 Bette Davis melodrama is enough to elicit a smirk: After a woman’s twin sister drowns, the survivor assumes her sibling’s identity to win back the man she feels her twin stole from her years before. (Photo: Everett Collection)

Nearly 20 years later in 1964, Davis was at it again, playing an identical twin who assumes the identity of her dead sister. The twist this time: She killed her! (Photo: Everett Collection)

This 2009 crime dramedy focuses on a pot-growing twin who lures his Ivy League professor brother back to their Oklahoma town to thwart a local drug lord.

This 1935 horror movie revolves around an evil twin who murders his brother and impersonates him to maintain power over their family’s castle. (Photo: Columbia)

In David Cronenberg’s 1988 thriller, Irons plays twin doctors who share lovers, taking on each other’s respective identities. But they lose sight of their game when they start to squabble over a new paramour, played by Geneviève Bujold. (Photo: Everett Collection)

Also with Jeremy Irons, this 1998 action adventure revolves around the imprisoned secret twin of King Louis XIV of France — both portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio. (Photo: Everett Collection)

This 1995 comedy pits twin brothers against each other when only one inherits their adopted mother’s estate. (Photo: 20th Century Fox)

Spoiler! Audiences were stunned to find out at the end of Christopher Nolan’s 2006 magic-themed movie that Bale was playing a twin the whole time — to preserve the believability of a crowd-pleasing stage trick. (Photo: Warner Bros.)