10 Mind-Bending Films Where Actors Star Opposite Themselves

The mid-point of Christopher Nolan's work, at least in terms of scale and overall filmmaking approach, The Prestige offers up big stars and spectacle, with Nolan's trademark narrative puzzles, while remaining surprisingly down-to-earth, forgoing the extreme stunts and sets the director has of late become known for. 

Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman star as warring magicians, whose desperate need to upstage and outdo each other turns sinister and dark, their lives' work becoming their folly in a deadly game of one-upmanship. And it is a hotbed of doubles and duplicates, with both lead actors playing at least two versions of themselves.

Bale plays Alfred "The Professor" Borden, a man whose mute assistant Bernard Fallon turns out to be his twin brother in disguise - an arrangement that allows them to swap and switch and perform some seemingly impossible tricks. Jackman plays aristocratic magician Lord Caldlow, masquerading as Robert "The Great Danton" Angier, as well as Gerald Root, a drunk that the magician uses as his double in his trick the New Transported Man. But Jackman also plays several more versions of himself farther in - identical clones produced by the machine Nikola Tesla (David Bowie) creates for him - and whom he secretly kills nightly as part of his real transported man act.

A lesson in technical wizardry as well as sacrifice, secrecy and obsession, The Prestige uses duplicate performances to straddle its core theme of duality in all its moral complexities.