Doesn't every actor want to play their evil twin? Not so sure audiences clamor for twin stories, but they do make for quirky, sometimes campy classics. Here are some of my favorites:
Bette Davis plays sisters Margaret (rich and bad, a husband murderer) and Edith (good and poor) in Dead Ringer. This is not a great movie, but it is compellingly watchable. Bette has to vie with good guy cop suitor Karl Malden and naughty boy toy Peter Lawford in this sordid '60s murder mystery. Apparently Bette played twins in another earlier film, A Stolen Life, which I have yet to see.
Eddie Murphy as movie star Kit ("Keep it Together, K-I-T") Ramsay and his nerdy brother Jiff in Bowfinger, a sarcastically funny take on Hollywood from Frank Oz and Steve Martin. This movie is just as funny whether you're watching it for the first or fifteenth time and Murphy is truly great at two very different, wacked out twins. He has always liked to play multiple characters, and did that to perfection in The Nutty Professor, his riff on Jerry Lewis's '60s version.
Jeremy Irons as creepy twins in the creepy Dead Ringers, directed by creepy David Cronenberg, who always seems to make creepy movies. They play twin gynecologists, who both start messing around with the wonderful Geneviève Bujold, who deserves much better.
Nicolas Cage plays screenwriter Charlie Kauffman and his nebbish brother Donald in Spike Jones's Adaptation, a surreal take on Susan Orleans's bestseller about the orchid industry in Florida. Meryl Streep, Tilda Swinton and Chris Cooper are along with the Cage (s) for the ride.
Twin-age is not limited to comedy and arty films. Action-adventure's own Jean Claude Van Damme beats himself up in Double Impact - what's not to love about that? Well, a lot actually, but it's still pretty fun.
If you were expecting the classic twinfest The Parent Trap, I'm sorry, but I don't like either version, Mills or Lohan. But I do love the concept of identical cousins, which isn't exactly a twin scenario, but it's wacky enough to fit this theme, and has that unforgettable theme song, to boot.
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