While shared media, like films and shows, are one of the easiest ways for a lot of people to mistake the same person for someone else, this phenomenon is old enough that multiple cultures' folklore has tales, legends, and monsters around the concept. Fortunately, in this day and age, the worst a look-alike may do is embarrass you during a movie night.
Another word for people that look way too similar to someone else is the wonderful German loanword, doppelgänger, which literally means double walker, which first comes up in written sources in Jean Paul’s 1796 novel “Siebenkäs.” It didn’t enter mainstream use outside of the German language until almost a century later.
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Scientists have actually determined that people who look very similar to each other, tend to have more genes in common than people who don’t. Mind you, this applies to true “doppelgänger,” not people with a few traits in common. The implications are that there could be similarities beyond just appearance, meaning that the people listed here might all be famous for a similar reason.
If scrolling through these pictures made you start to question who you had seen where you wouldn’t be alone, Filmmaker Ron Howard, father of Bryce Dallas Howard, once mistook Jessica Chastain for his own daughter, although Bryce Dallas Howard is a whole three inches taller than Chastain.
Of course, some examples, like the Olsen twins are sort of cheating, since the real difficulty is quickly telling them apart, not mixing them up with a fully unrelated person. Contrary to popular belief, not all twins share the majority of characteristics, in most cases two separate eggs are fertilized by two separate sperm, so the children are just siblings, whose traits differ or not to varying degrees.
Writers of all shapes and sizes have long loved the potential for storytelling from a mistaken identity or, even worse, a hostile doppelgänger. Dostoyevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lord Byron, among many, many others center plots around a person who looks very similar to someone else, or this concept is used as a metaphor to explore human nature and our perceptions of things.
Films and comic books have used similar ideas as well, indeed, a character that can physically turn into someone else is almost a trope in the superhero genre, although the actual concept goes a lot further back to mythology. Everything from horror to comedies has centered on this concept, with both supernatural entities and comedic misunderstandings in equal measure.
