Villainy and Virtue: The Art of Cinematic Duality and “Double Roles”

Digging deeper into film history, hero-villain doppelgangers run rampant. In early 20th century screwball comedies, they were nearly the norm. Charlie Chaplin often played the Tramp and the Tramp’s demise in whatever slapstick situation arose. Deeper into his career, with The Great Dictator, Chaplin used the comedic casting premise for satirically incisive commentary on WWII, playing both the everyman Jewish barber and Hitler-parallel Adenoid Hynkel, dictator and leader of the Nami party who effectively looks exactly like Hitler and the Tramp.

Monster man Lon Chaney walked with The Penalty, one of the first crime films to hero-villain, in 1920 – playing both the bad Blizzard and his law-abiding alter ego – so that De Niro could run over 100 years later with The Alto Knights. John Ford did it with Edward G. Robinson to incredible effect in 1935’s The Whole Town’s Talking, double-casting him as a spineless clerk who happens to look exactly like, and be mistaken for, a hardened criminal made entirely of spine.

The first major sci-fi film capitalized on one woman playing the hero and villain in what amounted to a much greater swing of a casting decision in 1927, because it wasn’t for comedy or crime; rather, gutting existential effect. By the end of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Brigitte Helm’s young, innocent Maria is transformed into the ageless machine villain (we still see plenty of today), the shapes and signs of Maria’s humanity caged within the flat, cold, hard metal of the Maschinenmensch that represents industrial and technological progress at any cost.

The Stepford Wives explored a similar theme for different reasons, portraying Katherine Ross as both the real, acclimating, ultimately suffering housewife Joanna and the perfect (read: not human) Stepford wife clone of herself to chilling effect. In reality, the husbands are the villains here, but as far as the human wives are concerned, their stepford-android equivalents are nothing but pure evil. Rainer Werner Fassbinder even took on the premise in 1978’s Despair, casting Dirk Bogarde as a morally muddied man going mad who murders what he perceives to be his doppelganger, despite the man looking nothing like him.

In 1946’s A Stolen Life, Bette Davis doesn’t cleanly straddle the hero-villain line, but she plays twin sisters, the alive one of which harbors deep resentment toward the dead one for having stolen her lover, a nemesis-esque relationship at play between two. Sixteen years later, however, she would lean directly into a hero-villain version of a similar story – Dead Ringer – but in this one, her working class twin murders the bourgeois twin. In between the two, Kim Novak made waves as both Madeleine Elster and the plotting Judy Barton in Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

In 1988, David Cronenberg would find inspiration in Bette Davis’s hero-villains, twisting the tale into his own story filled out by twin Jeremy Irons, one unassuming and the other up to no good. Recently, Irons handed Dead Ringers off to Rachel Weisz for a 2023 series adaptation of the Cronenberg film. In terms of twins, Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy doesn’t technically fit, but it might as well, the two Jake Gyllenhaals finding themselves later in life like long-lost twins who don’t know what the hell is going on. Much like the estranged good-and-evil twins of Matthew Modine’s Equinox.

Speaking of confusion, Face/Off remains one of the most popular iterations on the theme, Nicolas Cage and John Travolta switching between FBI agent Sean Archer and terrorist Castor Troy. The situation in Face/Off also begs a deeper question, one that would expand the microcosm of hero-villaining: what do we consider the masked imitators in the Mission: Impossible franchise? Food for thought, no doubt.

The ’90s saw a peak in popularity of the hero-villain dual-casting move in a slew of genre-bent movies that wouldn’t exist today if films had to be discussed to survive, like Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Double Impact and Leonardo DiCaprio’s The Man in the Iron Mask. Entering the new millennia, Jet Li blew the minds of dads, their middle school sons, and Kevin Feiges everywhere with the release of The One, in which Li plays not only the heroic and escaped convict versions of Gabriel Yulaw but gives cameos as some of the 123 dead multiverse caricatures of Yulaw (businessman, vampiric grunge-rock appreciator, queer blondie, long-haired stoner, rastafarian (this one didn’t age well)).

With how many movies get made these days, hero-villain casting has become less rare, but what’s remained rare are the worthwhile iterations. In the 21st century, Richard Ayoade is responsible for one of the most engagingly written, effectively directed, literarily informed, and philosophically disciplined explorations of self – the likes of which lays out a hero-villain-type relationship but wisely contests the concept of moral binaries – via Jesse Eisenbergs in an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Double, still the best book to double-cast.

In a shocking twist, the fifth sequel of one of the most popular horror franchises gave us what might still be the best hero-villain casting of the 21st century in the twin Michael Fassbender androids of Alien: Covenant, David and Walter, both of whom, as robots, carry an undetectable sense of ethic that complicates the characters magnificently. In the same tier of modern greats is Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II. The film shirks an easy hero-villain interpretation of the identical doting lovers, but Masahiro Higashide’s performances are full of contagious feelings, leading you to love one version of him and detest the other.

In 2025, Theo James has already done it for The Monkey (a fun Final Destination-like movie, but his overexertion of the binary is a good example of how double-casting can turn from great trick to grating trope). Hell, even Helly R. qualifies for Severance! Other recents include Mia Goth in X, Hugh Jackman in Logan, Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass in The One I Love, and Lupita Nyong’o in Us. Peele’s sci-fi-horror destruction-of-selves, in which almost everyone cast plays a good and evil version of themselves, is one of the most fascinating explorations of the theme to date – a movie devised entirely around the idea that both protagonist and antagonist exist firmly within us, or the potential for both, at least.

It should come as no surprise that most of the best versions of hero-villaining are philosophically dense, spiritually provocative explorations of the self. Why? Because the soul houses our sense of identity, and the soul is an interior realm, an invisible entity that requires processing through visible, exterior means (unless one simply prefers to psychologically erode). The capacity then for art, much less cinema, to communicate strange and new angles of understanding on the self becomes one of its greatest tools. From serious drama to bone-chilling horror to pure physical comedy, the sub-micro-genre of hero-villainry is a goldmine of insights on the human condition.

It presents an eternally contemplative, entertaining, dream-or-nightmare situation that we seem to fixate on across time, genre, and culture – an ongoing artistic study of the human condition, an attempt to better understand oneself or answer the question, “Who am I?” Perhaps if we could meet our evil selves (I’m assuming you, dear reader, are the good one), or see ourselves purely from the perspective of someone else, or fracture the self into discernible ethical parts, that would solve the species-plaguing problem of self-understanding – we could finally know who we are. Or, maybe that double would just piss us off and we’d yearn back for the simplicity of mystery.

Luke Hicks is a New York City film journalist and arts enthusiast by way of Austin, TX. He got his master’s studying film philosophy and ethics at Duke and thinks every occasion should include one of the following: whiskey, coffee, gin, tea, beer, or olives. Love or lambast him on Twitter @lou_kicks.