10 Mind-Bending Films Where Actors Star Opposite Themselves

As mentioned, David Cronenberg loves a bit of strange, and if he can thumb in some body horror in the process, then all the better. While far from his most visceral or disturbing film, Dead Ringers nonetheless tacks closely to the Cronenberg playbook, offering up scientific impossibilities, fever dreams and descents into personal destruction. 

Jeremy Irons plays identical gynaecologist twins Beverly ("Bev") and Elliot ("Ellie") Mantle, whose obsession with female anatomy starts young, but has an unusually scientific bent to it. A smooth-talking philanderer, Ellie uses his position as head of a prestigious clinical practice in Toronto to meet and sleep with women, before switching places and passing them off to his mild-mannered wallflower of a brother Bev. But this double act comes up against a brick wall when Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold), an actress with a mutant trifurcated cervix, steals Bev's heart and gets him hooked on prescription drugs.

Considering the film's lack of CGI, the seamless pairing of Irons' characters, who live, eat and work together, is as impressive as their antics are disturbing. And, unlike most of Cronenberg's other films, the story is based on the real-life case of twin gynaecologists Stewart and Cyril Marcus, who died together in circumstances we can only hope were better than the Mantle brothers'.