In Gemini Man, Will Smith is forced to battle a younger version of himself who can predict his every move. Paul Rudd merely has to cohabit with his own better self in Netflix’s imminent Living With Myself. In doing so, they joins a small group of stars, including Keanu Reeves, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael Keaton, whom Hollywood has cloned or otherwise duplicated for our entertainment.

Cinema has a long-held fascination with its actors taking on multiple roles. While some of English-language filmmaking’s earliest stars, like William Bergman and Buster Keaton, would often play more than one role within any one picture, the first doppelgänger film was a 1913 German art film, A Student of Prague, co-directed by Stellen Rye and Paul Wagener.

A young college student, played by Wagener, trades his own mirror reflection to a sorcerer for gold so he may court a rich Countess. Eventually driven mad by the constant pursuit of his exact double, he tries to murder his twin, killing himself in the process. A macabre piece of fantasy-horror, the picture spearheaded technology that allowed the same actor to appear on screen with himself, creating a template for others to follow suit.

In 1936, British-made comedy The Man in the Mirror took a similar approach, having Edward Everett Horton’s reflection begin talking to him before stepping out of the mirror and living the hard-partying life he never had the confidence for.

Though it’s played more light-heartedly here, the existential terror of replacement would become a prevalent theme within the subgenre.

Works during the fifties like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and I Married An Astro-Monster channeled the same fear through a political lens. Aliens trying to invade Earth through cloning or taking human identities were used as a stand-in for American paranoia over the ‘invisible invasion’ of Communism. The doubles acted suspiciously out of character and it was up to those who knew something was different to put things right.

1970’s The Man Who Haunted Himself took this a step further, as Roger Moore‘s protagonist wakes from a car accident to find his life upended by someone everyone else thought to be him. In what Moore considers his best film, this Basil Dearden-directed thriller explores the psychological underpinnings of the concept by earnestly following Moore’s perspective to the last, only revealing the truth in the climax.

The second, more well-known and distinctly darker version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers followed towards the end of the decade, whose morbid twist on the ending contains this heavily-giffed final shot. Filmmakers were shedding the inherent belief that someone would figure out a clone from the original, using the mystery to captivate audiences and dig into themes of conformity, humanity and personhood.

John Carpenter brought much of this to a head in The Thing, a tightly wound fusion of high-concept sci-fi and horror that turned Kurt Russell into a one-man army against a shape-shifting alien force that usurps his Antarctic colleagues one by one.

Thanks to movies such as Robocop, Evil Dead and Nightmare on Elm Street, science fiction and horror moved towards a more satirical, self-aware tone during the ’80s and ’90s.

Actors playing multiple roles came back in popularity, including cloning rom-com Multiplicity starring multiple Michael Keatons. Jackie Chan shouldered double duty in the quasi-doppelgänger action film involving estranged twins, Twin Dragons, as did Jean Claude Van Damme for Double Impact.

Director Sheldon Lettich commented that Van Damme enjoyed playing twins because they let him showcase his range, and the picture was so successful, Van Damme did it twice more for Maximum Risk in 1997 and Replicant in 2001. Jeremy Irons played less boisterous (but much weirder) twins in David Cronenberg’s body horror Dead Ringers.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has played more Terminators than we can count (and to pull off its special effects T2: Judgment Day employed real-life identical twins Linda and Leslie Hamilton and Don and Dan Stanton). He returned to replication in The 6th Day – awash in technological anxiety, this 2000 movie imagines a future where cloning anything except a human is legal and widely accepted.

Explosive and markedly less neurological than the likes of previously mentioned The Man Who Haunted Himself, there’s still a poignancy to Schwarzenegger’s turn as a family man stuck chasing bad guys rather than having a quiet night in. Being a performer for a living doesn’t often include much down time, and the threat of being replaced by the next best version of you is forever looming.

Doppelgänger movies made a gradual resurgence later in the 2000s, particularly among indie and arthouse directors and actors. Duncan Jones’ minimalist drama Moon contains a career-best pair of performances from Sam Rockwell as two conveyor belt clones who decide to burn down the factory, and Jesse Eisenberg is driven to madness when a sleeker, smoother model of him takes over his life before his very eyes in Richard Ayoade’s The Double.

Similarly, in Denis Villenueve’s Enemy, Jake Gyllenhaal portrays a shy, introverted, emotionally closed off college lecturer who develops an obsession with a lookalike who proves to be his exact opposite.

These all use symbolism of clones and exact doubles to visualise difficult, deep-rooted fears surrounding identity, labour, personal value and desirability. They ponder the surreal mix of terror and curiosity that would result from seeing your fully formed self, but different, existing in the world. They contrast the life you have with the life you could have had, if you were just a tad more confident and a mite less neurotic; if you were raised in an altogether better environment.

That quandary forms the spine of Jordan Peele’s Us, released earlier this year, where Lupita Nyong’o’s family are terrorised by their clones. In Us, clones are “tethered” to the originals, forced to copy their every move as a population of copies live out their lives in an abandoned underground facility. As in Moon, Peele uses man-made doppelgängers to discuss the expendability of the lower class and lower-skilled labour.

One of the creepier moments features Elisabeth Moss’ Tethered putting on lipstick in the mirror for the first time, finally getting to see herself the way her counterpart did. In Us, Peele shows us the Tethered’s point-of-view, letting us feel the resentment and animosity and demonstrating that we would be as uncanny to any clone as they would be to us.

Will Smith has his work cut out keeping up with his double in Gemini Man. The former Fresh Prince and Man In Black is squaring up against his own youth, a terrifying prospect for anyone. Paul Rudd, meanwhile, only has to face his own inadequacy in Living With Myself.

For better or worse, it seems Hollywood is finally taking a long hard look at itself.

Gemini Man is out in cinemas on Friday, October 11. Living with Myself is on Netflix on October 18

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