seeing double: brendan hunt and my doppelgängers
Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt) experiences a particularly dark night of the soul on Ted Lasso
“You have a doppelgänger,” an old friend messaged me earlier this month, referring to a man she was sitting next to on a flight from Turkey to New York.
It seems like I have a lot of doppelgängers — one of whom I sort of recently met.
Over the years, I’ve been told I look like — or have been outright mistaken for — Mad Money host Jim Cramer, Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Billy Joel, Get a Life cocreator and star Chris Elliott, actor and Searching for Italy culinary traveler Stanley Tucci, and some home and garden fixer-upper dude I’ve never heard of. It’s not exactly a bevy of beauties, so I try not to mention it too often.
No one has ever asked me for an autograph thinking I am Edgar Degas, but I’m a dead ringer for his ca. 1865 self-portrait in which he is holding out his hat, saluting. After seeing “Manet/Degas” at the Met last year, I made the painting my Facebook profile picture (even though it was not actually in the exhibit.)
Several Edgar Degas self-portraits could have been my yearbook photo (Self-Portrait. or Degas Saluant, oil on canvas, ca. 1863 / courtesy Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian)
Shortly before the pandemic, when my wife and I were walking across a pedestrian bridge in Hong Kong, a young couple heading in the opposite direction stopped about two dozen feet away and the man snapped some photos of me; as they passed by, I heard the woman ask excitedly, “Did you get it? Did you get it?!” I have no idea who they thought I was.
Later, at the Patan Museum in Nepal on that same trip, a group of young men asked if they could take photos with me. They didn’t speak English and I don’t know Nepalese, so, again, I don’t know who they believed I was. When we asked a friend who lives in Nepal, she said they must have thought I was Louis C.K., who is about seven inches taller than me and weighs fifty pounds more. “We have very bad TV reception here,” she explained. “His program is very blurry.”
An October 2022 article in Live Science magazine teases, “Does Everyone Have a Look-Alike?” Writer Adam Hadhazy says we do: “Does everyone have a doppelgänger? There’s a fairly decent chance of it, actually, thanks to the limited number of genes that influence facial features. ‘There is only so much genetic diversity to go around,’ said Michael Sheehan, an assistant professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University, who routinely studies appearance variations and genetics in species such as paper wasps and house mice. ‘If you shuffle that deck of cards so many times, at some point, you get the same hand dealt to you twice.’”
I’ve always been fascinated by the use of doppelgängers in literature, from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Edgar Allan Poe — we’re not talking evil twins, alter egos, or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde–like transformations but mirror-image separate beings. Earlier today, I was at a matinee and said hello to playwright and actor Jesse Eisenberg, which reminded me of Richard Ayoade’s fine 2014 film The Double, an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1846 novella; Eisenberg portrays shy office drone James Simon as well as the suave and sophisticated Simon James.
Since 1999, Canadian photographer François Brunelle has been documenting doppelgängers in his “I’m not a look-alike!” project, consisting of photographs that bring together strangers who appear to be doubles of each other, a kind of twist on the pop-culture fave “Separated at Birth.”
But these strangers might actually be somewhat related after all. A study in Cell Reports in August 2022 announced, “Look-alike humans identified by facial recognition algorithms show genetic similarities.” The authors noted, “The expansion of the world wide web and the possibility to exchange pictures of humans across the planet has increased the number of people identified online as virtual twins or doubles that are not family related. Herein, we have characterized in detail a set of ‘look-alike’ humans, defined by facial recognition algorithms, for their multiomics landscape. We report that these individuals share similar genotypes and differ in their DNA methylation and microbiome landscape. These results not only provide insights about the genetics that determine our face but also might have implications for the establishment of other human anthropometric properties and even personality characteristics.”
I’m writing this shortly before the Super Bowl is about to start, the championship of the National Football League. Last week I spoke briefly with the man who portrays one of my famous doppelgängers, a British soccer — oops, football — assistant coach. Ted Lasso was an immediate breakout hit when it debuted on Apple TV in August 2020. And almost as immediately, people began telling me that I look like Coach Beard, played by Chicago-born actor and comedian Brendan Hunt.
I dressed as Coach Beard for a Halloween party in 2022 (photo by twi-ny/ees)
In fact, in October 2022, I went to a Halloween party dressed as Coach Beard, complete with official AFC Richmond sweatsuit, dark sunglasses, cap, and whistle. Not everyone at the party knew who Coach Beard was, but when they Googled him, they were awestruck by the resemblance.
I found myself identifying with Coach Beard, and not just because I looked like him. I appreciated his biting, sarcastic sense of humor and was riveted by the “Beard After Hours” episode in season two, when he experiences a dark night of the soul.
Hunt was at SoHo Playhouse last week presenting an encore engagement of his International Fringe solo show The Movement You Need. The seventy-five-minute play focuses on his complicated relationship with his late mother; their primary connection was their shared love of the Beatles, which Hunt wanted to tell Paul McCartney about when he unexpectedly got a chance to meet him a few years ago. He realized he couldn’t tell Sir Paul the whole story, so he turned it into The Movement You Need, named for a line in “Hey Jude.”
I fully understand Hunt’s obsession with the Beatles. When I was a kid, my friends and I would listen to all the records, including playing The Beatles (alternately known as the White Album) backward so we could trace the supposed death of Paul and his replacement, the doppelgänger Billy Shears. In 1975, my family saw Beatlemania on Broadway. The next year, for my thirteenth birthday, my father took me to my first concert, Paul McCartney and Wings at Madison Square Garden. A few years after that, my friends and I went to the Fest for Beatles Fans on Long Island, where we saw a rare screening of Magical Mystery Tour and I bought several collector items, which I still have. Brendan mentioned the fest in his show, the 2024 version of which is taking place this weekend.
Brendan Hunt and I share a few words after The Movement You Need (photo by twi-ny/ees)
Standing outside after the play, I saw Hunt nearby, posing for selfies with fans. I don’t do selfies, so I just told him that I thoroughly enjoyed it and that I had a very similar Beatles obsession. (However, my wife did take a picture of me speaking with him.)
About ten years ago, I was walking in a drizzly Midtown when I saw Paul with a small entourage coming toward me; he was holding a pristine white umbrella over his head.
Without stopping, I patted my heart and said, “Hello, Sir Paul.”
He looked me in the eyes, smiled, and responded, “Lovely to see you again.”
I had never met him before; perhaps he thought I was one of my doppelgängers.
A few years ago, the cashier at a checkout line told me that my doppelgänger had been in the store hours earlier. I found it so jarring that I didn't press for details.
Mark,
How about a younger doppelganger of you? There is a young fellow named Caesar who works for Capsule Pharmacy, who delivers prescriptions to tenants in the building where I work. He looks EXACTLY like a 25 year-old version of Mr. Mark Rifkin!!! When he comes by, I always say "Hi, Caesar, the younger double of my high school friend", or I did until it got a bit tired around the tenth time.
When I was about 7 and my sister was about 4, we were with my parents on line to see the Radio City Christmas Show (the film before the show was the musical version of "Scrooge" with Albert Finney. Somehow, my father got separated from us, and it was just my mom and us. There was a guy on line a few feet away, smoking a cigar, who looked exactly like my father. My sister went over to him and said "Hi, Daddy!", which he kept ignoring every time she said it. I told my sister that's not our dad, because he was wearing white loafers, and our Dad never wore white loafers, so she backed down. When I pointed him out to my mom, she said he looked exactly like my Dad, and I told her it's not Dad because of those shoes. A few minutes later, my "real" Dad showed up.
Glenn