This week I’ll continue my coverage of 2025 at the movies, rounding up some of the titles that didn’t make my top ten. But first, I wanted to post about an interesting trend I noticed in last year’s films: actors playing multiple roles in the same movie.

At first it was just a few high-profile examples, but the more movies I saw the more this emerged as a real pattern. Eventually, I identified at least 16 actors doing double (or even triple) duty. I’ve broken them out by category below.

TWINS
The most popular reason to double up a performance, and a ticket to an Oscar nomination for one of these actors.

– Michael B. Jordan in Sinners
– Dylan O’Brien in Twinless
– Both Theo James as older twins and Christian Convery as their younger versions in The Monkey
– Blake Lively as two of three triplets in Another Simple Favor

FAMILY MEMBERS
Not twins, but members of the same family that look enough alike to share an actor.

– Diane Kruger as sisters in The Shrouds. Kruger also has a third role as the voice of an online assistant.
– Wagner Moura as the principal character’s son in The Secret Agent

ROBOTS
Synthetic, lifelike machines that have multiple models, some of which look the same.

– Elle Fanning and Cameron Brown as Weyland-Yutani androids in Predator: Badlands
– Sophie Thatcher as a sexbot in Companion

CLONES
They’re human (or Kryptonian), but another version is created from their DNA.

– Robert Pattinson as 18 versions of an Expendable worker in Mickey 17
– David Corenswet as Superman as well as Ultraman, a masked clone created by Lex Luthor in Superman
– Yonas Kibreab doing the voices of both the lead character and an alien-spawned clone in Elio

ALTER EGO
– Lewis Pullman plays Bob, an amnesiac superhero with unlimited powers, and The Void, a shadowy dark version of himself in Thunderbolts*. This is a bit of a stretch because these are two aspects of the same being, but the film does depict them physically facing off at one point so I’m including it.

TOTALLY UNRELATED
These characters are not blood relatives but they share a performer.

– Robert DeNiro played feuding gangsters Vito Genovese and Frank Costello in The Alto Knights
– Various cast members portray different characters in the alternate universes of The Life of Chuck
– Mia Goth plays Victor Frankenstein’s mother as well as the fiancé of his younger brother in Frankenstein. Goth previously did double duty in 2022’s X.