Move Over, Michael B. Jordan and Robert Pattinson! This Is the Best Dual Role Performance in a Movie, Ever -

We’re truly living through a twin-assaince in cinema, with many high-profile recent films using the gimmick of one actor playing dual roles. Playing lookalikes can be one of the greatest tests of an actor’s skills, as they must clue us in to the nuances of each person without relying on any overt physical cheats like prosthetics. Actors ranging from Michael B. Jordan to Robert Pattinson to Dylan O’Brien have all gotten some of the best acclaim of their respective careers for playing doubles/twins in different films.

There’s a great legacy of twin performances throughout film history, but with all due respect to the actors I just mentioned, they all stand in the collective shadow of Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers. Irons’ performance in David Cronenberg‘s masterpiece is a skin-crawling study of codependency and the shared masculine delusion of mastery of the universe.

What is ‘Dead Ringers’ About?

Elliot and Beverly comforting each other in 'Dead Ringers.' — Image via 20th Century Fox

Beverly and Elliot Mantle (Irons) are hugely renowned twin gynecologists who specialize in fertility, and they use their position to carry out a twisted sexual ritual. The charismatic alpha male Elliot easily seduces the women who come to their clinic, and when he’s had his fill of them, he passes them onto the more soft-hearted and timid beta Beverly. Since the women are never made aware of this switch, the brothers’ ploy works as an effective metaphor for the corrosive quality that patriarchal rape culture inflicts on social gender dynamics.

Nothing has disrupted their routine until an actress named Claire (Geneviéve Bujold) comes to their clinic, seeking to cure her infertility. It’s business as usual until Beverly becomes genuinely emotionally interested in her, which Elliot finds to be a ridiculous and repulsive notion. As Beverly and Claire pursue a real relationship, the synchronicity between Beverly and Elliot is permanently altered, which leads to a total downward spiral in their lives.

Jeremy Irons Makes It Hard To Know the Difference Between the Two

Part of the challenge of the role is that Beverly and Elliot are perfectly identical, even down to how they dress. The only physical trait that sets them apart is how they wear their hair, with Elliot keeping his swept back and Beverly letting his hang in front of his face slightly. Everything else comes down to Irons’ disposition and how he modulates his voice, the callous bravado of Elliot clashing with the considerate fragility of Beverly, making for one of the creepiest performances ever given on screen.

His performance hones in on a fundamental truth that, despite their seemingly opposite personalities, both Beverly and Elliot are misogynist control freaks who depend entirely on each other for a sense of validation. Most dual performances succeed by making us see the two as entirely different people, but the real fun with Dead Ringers comes when the identity binary starts to become muddled. It becomes harder to know when Beverly and Elliot are pretending to be the other, becoming each other’s self-reflexive Jungian shadow, effectively morphing into two halves of one spiritual being. For instance, there’s a moment where Beverly drunkenly crashes a big public award by insisting that he’s actually Elliot, even as Elliot is on stage. But what if it was Beverly on stage claiming to be Elliot while Elliot drunkenly shows up?

Jeremy Irons Worked Out the Tiniest Physical Details

Only Irons knew for sure which was which, as he developed a system where he kept track of who he was playing by using internal energy points that he filtered his performances through. If he was Beverly, he led with his neck, and if he was Elliot, he led with his forehead, so that even when he was pretending to be the other twin on the outside, he subconsciously clues us in to who he is on the inside. He also allegedly would stand on the balls of his feet to play Beverly, and then stand on his heels to play Elliot, a subtle shift in the power stance that reflected the brothers’ respective ability to assert themselves. To mirror the ego clashing that the two undergo, Irons started mixing his separate costumes together, and went from having two dressing rooms to just one. Those little choices worked in conjunction with David Cronenberg’s intelligent craft choices, most notably using a computer-controlled camera system that ensured that Irons’ position in the frame would be precise. Because of how high this bar was, Cronenberg chose not to indulge in too many fancy two-shots of both twins in the frame at the same time, feeling it wasn’t necessary to show off the magic trick too often. In a similar vein, the ultimate magic trick, and why Jeremy Irons’ performance is so totemic among this subgenre of acting, is not that Beverly and Elliot can seem like two distinct human beings. It’s that Irons makes you question if they were ever two separate people in the first place.