"I'm 6ft 5in, 220lb and there are two of me." The self-righteous Winklevoss twins, real-life nemeses of Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, get some of the best lines in ripping new movie The Social Network, but they also presented the biggest casting headache. What are the chances of locating an identical pair of strapping, blond, Olympian actors? Director David Fincher searched in vain, but ultimately found a solution that subtly raises the bar for movie-twin technology.
The "Winklevi", as they're pointedly described, look exactly alike on screen, but the credits list two actors: Armie Hammer and Josh Pence. They acted out the scenes together, then swapped places and did the scene again. Then Hammer's head was digitally grafted onto Pence's body – similar to the way Fincher put Brad Pitt's face on to a baby in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, except less scary. So Pence now suffers the ignominy of being the guy in the Facebook movie without a face.
Why bother, you might ask, when individual actors have played twins so often in the past – Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers; Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap? Because, previously you could only bring the two characters together using awkward split-screens and body doubles, while now, The Social Network's twins can walk around each other, hand each other things, even row a boat together. The illusion is perfect – unless you've read this first, in which case you're likely to spend all your time looking for the join.
A giant leap for twin movie-kind, then, but in other ways, The Social Network is business as usual. There are really only two types of twin movie: prince-pauper/separated-at-birth stories (The Parent Trap, The Man in the Iron Mask, Jean-Claude Van Damme's Double Impact) or twins as signifiers of unnatural wrongness (Dead Ringers, the Matrix sequels, The Shining, anything starring the Olsen sisters). The Social Network's twins aren't exactly evil, but they're still the pantomime villains of the piece, and the double-butt of the jokes. It's paying off for actors Hammer and Pence, though – there's been Oscar buzz about their engaging turn. But how would they divvy up the statue?
