20 Brilliant Sci-Fi & Fantasy Films Where Actors Play Opposite Themselves

Denis Villeneuve can barely shift in his seat without it hitting The Hollywood Reporter, but a little over a decade ago, he was only beginning to make the journey from obscurity into global mega-stardom. Between far smaller films like Polytechnique and far larger ones like Dune came his middle period, in which big stars were paired with more manageable budgets in movies whose plots made you think.

Enter, Enemy.

Inspired (but only tangentially based on) Dostoevsky’s The Double, the Jake Gyllenhaal-led film puts the star in the roles of protagonist Adam Bell and antagonist Anthony Claire. Adam is an unadventurous and organised history professor whose life is turned upside down when he encounters Anthony, an actor who rides a motorcycle and likes to hit sex clubs on school nights. The pair get caught in a spiral as their lives and psyches intermesh, and nothing can explain why there are two of them, leading to disastrous consequences.

Anthony is designed as a manifestation of Adam, who is unhappy and unsettled in the life he has built and seeking to transgress, and the only way Villeneuve could do this was to make the characters identical, but with ‘different souls’. And this is why the director chose Gyllenhaal - while making the film, he could tell which character the actor was playing in each moment "just by the way he was breathing."