10 Mind-Bending Films Where Actors Star Opposite Themselves

Directed by Spike Jonze and written by metafiction maestro Charlie Kaufman, Adaptation is about as mind-bending as look-alike movies come. 

Nicolas Cage plays Charlie Kaufman himself, starring opposite Kaufman's fictional twin brother Donald, as they try to adapt Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief. Overwhelmed by a pervasive sense of inadequacy, an abiding sexual frustration and the wants of his freeloading twin brother, Charlie is forced into evermore bizarre situations that stretch the limits of his reality as his life becomes intertwined with the plot of the book.

Thus, the film serves as a fictionalised dramatisation of the undertaking of adapting the book, but in the process also functions as a partial adaptation of the book (which is itself not just a real book but a true story).

But, of course, this is Kaufman's piece, and he uses the doubling of himself to bed in the off-kilter nature of the whole affair, throwing an additional spanner in the works with increasingly layered levels of metafiction that never fully unravel. And if that sounds confusing, Cage's expectedly zany dual performance and Jonze's playful, frenetic directorial style serve only to enhance the strangeness of it all, offering no straightforward answers but, mercifully, a satisfying conclusion.