Scenes Secretly Filmed With A Look-Alike Family Member
Body and stunt doubles are the unsung heroes of the movie industry, putting themselves on the line so a celebrity getting paid infinitely more money can get all the credit for the cool stuff they do onscreen. Thanks to the magic of editing, stunt doubles don't often have to look all that much like the actor they're filling in for—and can even work for multiple actors in the same film.
Every now and again, though, a production calls for a double who really needs to have a strong physical resemblance to a star. Who better to call on than an actor's close relative? These films took advantage of shared DNA to pull off some tricky scenes, leaving audiences none the wiser.
Penelope and Monica Cruz - Pirates of the Caribbean on Stranger Tides
The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is known primarily for two things: Johnny Depp's drunken swag walk and kick-ass swordfighting scenes. In the fourth installment of the franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean on Stranger Tides, series mainstay Keira Knightley was replaced by Penélope Cruz—who soon discovered she was pregnant with her first child. Kind of a problem, considering half her role involved trying to stab Johnny Depp dressed as a pirate and walking around holding a very sharp, pointy sword.
A solution was found in the form of Cruz's younger sister Monica, who—along with bearing a striking resemblance to Cruz—is a trained dancer with swordfighting experience. Monica reportedly doubled for Penélope during most of her fight scenes, as well as a number of full body shots later in production to hide her sister's baby bump.
If you've never heard of the younger Cruz, don't feel bad: although she's accrued her own level of celebrity in Spain, her lack of fluency in English has prevented her from making more of a splash in the United States. Still, Pirates director Rob Marshall had to be grateful to find a cheaper doppelgänger for his pregnant star.
The Hamilton Twins - Terminator 2
Terminator 2 features groundbreaking special effects realized with some of the most advanced digital and practical effects ever seen in a film up to that point—and yet one of the film's most impressive scenes was accomplished entirely without the use of either, and they removed it from the final cut.
We're talking about the deleted scene in which Linda Hamilton's character, Sarah Connor, opens up the Terminator's skull and performs some impromptu surgery on his robot brain while looking in a mirror. The scene was filmed using Hamilton's twin Leslie, who simply stood on the other side of the glass and mirrored her sister's movements.
Leslie also made a brief appearance as the T-1000 when it's mimicking Sarah Connor for the brief shot they're both seen in the same frame, and due to the fact she was noticeably less muscular than her sister (she's a nurse in the real world and hadn't undergone the same extensive training regimen as Linda), played her younger self in the nuclear holocaust nightmare scene.
According to Linda, Arnold Schwarzenegger had no idea she had a twin and made a fool of himself the first day Leslie was on set by sneaking up behind her and giving her a crushing bear hug. Just imagine: the Terminator sheepishly apologizing for a case of mistaken identity.
Jim Hanks - Forrest Gump, the voice of Woody
Despite appearing in a film where his character's whole deal is running for a really long time, Tom Hanks didn't actually spend much time pounding the pavement while filming Forrest Gump. In fact, he had his younger brother Jim fill in for him during some of the slow-mo and location shots "in Montana and South Carolina." Who wants to get all hot and sweaty when your almost identical brother is sitting right there and could do it for you?
Along with bearing a strong physical resemblance to his brother, Jim's voice is virtually identical to that of his more famous sibling, which has allowed him to earn a considerable amount of easy money voicing Woody in Toy Story media like the toys, games and straight-to-DVD films—and he's still managed to squeeze in the time to appear in shows like Scrubs and Sabrina the Teenage Witch as a man who looks weirdly like Tom Hanks.
Tanoai Reed - Most of the Rock's movies
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is a physically massive human being, so you'd think there aren't many stuntman who could convincingly pretend to be him. As it turns out, there's only one: Tanoai Reed, who also happens to be his cousin. If you watch wrestling, you know everyone claims to be related to the Rock, but unlike those posers who are only tenuously related to the most electrifying man in sports entertainment, Reed is a bona fide blood relative—and similarly fridge-shaped man.
As one of the few human beings with arms equal in size to his cousin, Reed has been working as his stunt double for virtually his entire acting career. In fact, Reed has doubled for his cousin for so long, he appeared in the films that still credited Dwayne as The Rock, the ones in which he starred as Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and, of course, the more recent blockbusters crediting him simply as Dwayne Johnson.
The Sprouse Twins - Big Daddy
Because we no longer live in a time when kids can be sent to work in the mines, there are a number of rules about exactly how long you can legally make a child actor work on a particular day. These numbers vary from state to state, but a general rule of thumb is that the younger the kid is, the less they can work. So what are you supposed to do if you're, say, Adam Sandler, and you're making a film with a role written for a child who isn't hefty enough to be replaced by Kevin James during action scenes?
Well, you could always do what Sandler did for his 1999 film Big Daddy: hire 7-year-old twins Dylan and Cole Sprouse to play your child character. This allowed production to double the amount of time they could film the Sprouses' scenes each day, safe in the knowledge nobody would be able to tell when they switched actors. The pair are so similar-looking, it's impossible to tell which brother is in which scene—which makes it all the weirder that when the producers of Friends decided to hire a child actor to play Ross' son Ben, they only hired one of the Sprouses. Which we're guessing must have resulted in a pretty awkward car ride home when both twins walked into the audition wearing the same outfit, gave the same line reading, and were told at the end that only one of them would get to meet Jennifer Aniston.
Caleb and Cody Walker - Furious 7
After Paul Walker's untimely death in 2013 midway through filming Furious 7, the future of the entire franchise was called into question. Production was temporarily halted while the studio sorted out options—one of which was using CGI to put his face onto one of his two brothers and have them film the rest of his scenes.
With the exception of a few of the more questionable CGI shots which have been deconstructed to show the process used to revive Walker for the role, Universal execs have refused to point out or mention specifically which scenes were finished without Walker's input. In addition, Weta Digital (who were in charge of creating the CGI version of the actor) went to great lengths to ensure absolute realism, studying hours of footage of Walker in character to make sure his CGI doppelgänger was indistinguishable from the real thing.
"Those digital models included extensive work on Walker's hair and skin—how his facial muscles moved if he frowned or raised his eyebrows, how his coloring would flush after exertion or how the hair changes depending on the light or the wind," noted Variety. "They even worked to make sure he blinked in character."
The end result is a film where it's near impossible to tell exactly when you're looking at Walker, re-purposed footage spliced into the scene, his face CGI'd onto one of his brother's bodies, or even a combination of all three used in tandem—which we guess was kind of the point.