Ever seen The Prestige?
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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I have seen The Prestige a long time ago! I totally forgot.
One of very few movies you can do very little to describe without giving away the movies big moment.
I wonder why Christian Bale's twin bro never acted again after that one.
Or Linda Hamilton's in Terminator 2, except literally.
This is not uncommon with twin child actors. The Olsen twins in Full House are a famous example
The Weasley Twins, Fred & George, from the Harry Potter world.
Terminator 2 uses identical twins twice. Once when T1000 copies the cop drinking coffee and later when the T1000 copies Sarah Connor.
The actor for Sarah Connor has a twin? Nani?
Linda and Leslie Hamilton, yes
Omg TIL.
I thought identical twins were extremely rare...
Did they specifially pick an actor that have an identical twin? Lmao
They're definitely rare, far more rare than many of the similar things to them like their opposite (chimerism where multiple sets of DNA but one person) or fraternal twins. But there's a lot of people and identical twins have advantages for child acting especially but acting in general. Then consider that likelihood of identical twins is a genetic trait and getting a break in acting is much easier if you have family in the industry.
Long story short, it's rare enough that even if you know several twins you may not know any identicals, but common enough that it's not weird for random actors to have an identical twin. It's typically just a lucky thing though and they rarely cast around it except for children (labor laws)
It was a happy coincidence. They didn’t need twins in the original Terminator, but in T2 the second terminator could change appearances. Linda’s sister was used when the terminator appeared as Sarah Connor.
Also most famously in the scene where Connor is messing about with T2's head or whatever, before a mirror. They had a stand-in for Schwarzenegger, but had Hamiltons on both sides of the ‘mirror’. But that scene might've been deleted or only in an extended edit, idk.
And iirc when Connor has the nuke dream, she sees herself on the playground, again via the power of having two of the twins.
That's awesome, I never know about this!
The scene is far away. I don't think you need twins for that. Being the same complexion plus some context to explain to the watcher that those are the same person would suffice.
Nothing in your example requires two actors.
It's not that it requires two (did you mean twin?) actors; that's what I meant about "not fully writing the play around them". The example here has someone wake up in a different place than they just were a split second ago, and the effect is really convincing because they're twins. You could make this work without twins, but it's a neat bit of trickery that's easy and seamless because you have twins to work with.
There's a series on Disney+ called "Pixar in Real Life". It's like candid camera, getting random people to react to strange stuff. They had a kid dressed as Dash from The Incredibles ask random people to time him running around a large building and surprising them by doing it impossibly fast. It was actually identical twins
Aaron and Shawn Ashmore are twin actors, I know that although Aaron actually played both of a set of twins in My Brother’s Keeper, Shawn is actually in some scenes.
It was more of a special effects shortcut, but it’s twins playing twins, so I don’t know if that counts!
Orphan Black: Live
Spoiler, but twins figure prominently in Christopher Nolan's film The Prestige.
"Best we can do is The Parent Trap. 🤷♂️"
The book, Das doppelte Lottchen, is better, and I think it had been adapted too
Would it be an error to make it a comedy?