Celebrity Doppleganger

The other night a couple friends and I were having an argument/discussion/boozefest where we all discussed celebrity look-a-likes. This happens a lot in my circle of friends, the question, "If you were casting a movie of your life, a biopic, who would you cast to play so-and-so?"

There was much discussion. Names were thrown around, everything from the lovely and talented Nancy Kerrigan to the less lovely and less talented (at least in the ice skating world) Danny Devito.

So, to see if I could find an unbiased answer, I turned to the internet.

I found a celebrity lookalike generator at this address: http://celebrity.picadilo.com/

There are certainly others out there, but this is the only one I found that doesn't require any email address, logging in, or any other nonsense. I try not to do that whenever possible. Giving up your email to find a celebrity lookalike is like telling someone your phone number to buy batteries.

Let's take a look at the results, starting with myself:

Hmm...okay, some awesome ones mixed in with some...Jay Leno. I see a couple problems with this right off. For starters, if I match Jay Leno 59% and Pierce Brosnan 58%, does that suggest that there's only about a 1% difference between the faces of these two men? Because I think people with the use of their eyes worldwide would disagree.

The other big problem I see is that looking like David Bowie could be pretty great. He had some handsome times. However, looking like the pale, vampiric version of David Bowie above is slightly less complimentary.

In order to see how much difference it makes depending on the picture, I tried a second one as well:

This makes absolutely no sense to me. I should get some extra points for getting 2 of 3 male Friends, and the two best, in my opinion. But if I looked 93% like Matt Damon, I would be far, FAR too busy working my way through trim to write blogs. And clearly, that is not the case.

Let's move on to friend #1:

Now, while the idea that my white male friend in his late 20's looks like Queen Latifah (my mom's favorite "rapper"), a black middle-aged woman, is hilarious, it doesn't really help me cast the movie so much. And again, a 1% difference between Queen Latifah and Owen Wilson? This shit ain't working. And though I feel like Ellen is funny, I don't know if the world is ready for that gender-bending role. So another picture was absolutely necessary.

A guy could do a lot worse than this. Denzel and the white Denzel (who could be Richard Gere OR Harrison Ford, depending on how you feel about cinema).

So how about a female friend?

What's interesting is that, of the three of us, she most often hears that she looks like different celebrities. None of THESE, but others of equal quality or better.

And though I respect what JK Rowling has done, I think seeing her as a celebrity look-alike is a stretch. She's a lot more famous for inventing a game where people straddle brooms than for having some kind of a face.

Second try:

Sooo....this is a little all over the map for my liking. Julianne Moore and Mariah Carey, both very beautiful. And Roman Polanski. Maybe this thing is really advanced, and maybe this particular friend has mannish hands.

Anyway, this strikes me as a good tool for determining celebrity lookalikes for two reasons:

1. It does not in any way take into account personality, which doesn't matter. If someone is going to play you in a movie, they learn your mannerisms, not the other way around.

2. Arguing about it is kind of pointless because if I say, "You look like Richard Dreyfuss," and you say, "No I don't. I'm a woman" we'll reach an impasse very quickly. But if you feed it into the machine, and everyone uses the same machine, you get what you get. And when it comes back with Jay Leno, you can walk away assuming that it's a programming issue instead of standing in front of the mirror for forty minutes, doing bits on newspaper typos while studying your chin.