The Unacknowledged Multiple

15 Nov, 2025

I put together a Letterboxd list some time ago on a cinematic device (trope?) that I find endlessly fascinating. To recap part of what I wrote in the description there: while it’s common to see actors take on multiple roles in films (just this year we saw it in Sinners, Mickey 17, and Nishaanchi), a far rarer variant exists where an actor plays several distinct characters but without any diegetic justification (no twins, clones, reincarnations, or the like), and where the multiplicity is meant to be obvious to the audience but invisible to everyone in the story-world. Case in point: the three disparate Tilda Swinton roles in Suspiria (2018). I’m calling this “the unacknowledged multiple”.

Some thoughts:¹

• We see this all the time on YouTube — in skits from one-man channels. Ironically, the very factor that makes this device so common there is what makes it so rare in major motion pictures, where large casts and budgets mean that the unacknowledged multiple is often a deliberate artistic choice.

• Sometimes, though, it arises as a practical expedient. In Kill Bill, Michael Parks plays two different characters: Ranger Earl McGraw in Vol. 1 and Esteban Vihaio in Vol. 2, but this wasn’t intended from the outset. Ricardo Montalbán was in fact the original choice for Esteban, but he flaked on the table read, causing Parks to take on the role in a last-minute pivot. There’s no aim per se in the dual casting here, just a pragmatic decision made on the fly.

• In comedies, TUM is almost always a gag, kind of like a big-screen extension of those YouTube skits (e.g., Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor and Coming to America). But even within a comedy, it doesn’t have to stay a throwaway joke. Consider Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, in which Paresh Rawal’s triple role also feels resonant, since the protagonist cycles through three father figures in his life and grows disenchanted with each one. Here, the shared face turns that pattern into something almost diagnostic.

• When not intended as a mere gag or show of an actor’s ability, TUM appears most intuitively when it literalises a kind of polarity (the oppressor/oppressed dyad in The Great Dictator, or the crone/starlet one in X), which makes it even more compelling for me when it is used outside that framework, as with Mieczysław Voit in Mother Joan of the Angels.

• What captivates me most about TUM is how absolutely it harnesses the singular affordances of the medium; only in film could such a device exist. I’m sure that it finds its origins in theatre (where I imagine it was born from the constraint of limited casts, then later evolved into a deliberate flourish), but cinema elevates the gambit into something dazzlingly unique:

  1. Editing allows these unrelated bodies with the same face to coexist in a single moment, a feat impossible on stage, where the multiples must remain partitioned by scene changes²
  2. The novel can’t even gesture toward this territory; it has characters but no actors, and thus no ontological layer through which such doubling could occur in the first place. (More on the novel later)

• The pool of candidates for the TUM tag expands if we include some technically valid contenders too, such as Doctor Strange, where the same actor portrays both the titular protagonist and the arch-nemesis. However, the portrayal of the latter almost crosses into the territory of animation, where it’s common for voice actors to play multiple characters without the audience being expected to notice. I’m going to argue that for a multiplicity to truly qualify as an ‘unacknowledged multiple’, it should be salient and, ideally, carry some thematic weight. So multiplicities relying on voiceovers, motion capture, or face-obscuring costumes wouldn’t really count.

• The in-story unacknowledgedment of the doubling sometimes sits on a softer, more ambiguous gradient too, rather than being strictly binary. The Green Knight and Coppola’s Dracula illustrate this well. The doppelgänger effect seeps non-definitively into the diegesis: someone in the film registers the uncanny repetition, if only implicitly. It’s never verbalised, but it isn’t invisible either, and that faint recognition carries a higher resonance: the very fact that the character perceives the echo shapes his behaviour in some way.

• Think of the exact opposite of TUM. To reframe the intro of this blog post: while it’s common to see a single character played by multiple actors in a film (showing the character at different ages, for instance), a far rarer variant exists where one character is portrayed by several distinct performers but without any diegetic justification (no age gaps, body swaps, or the like), and where the discontinuity is meant to be obvious to the audience but invisible to everyone in the story-world. Case in point: That Obscure Object of Desire, where Conchita is played by both Ángela Molina and Carole Bouquet.

  • Could we call this “the unacknowledged singular”?
  • Like TUM, TUS also ranges from the practical (Sharmaji Namkeen, where Paresh Rawal stepped in to complete the film after Rishi Kapoor’s demise mid-production) to the deliberate (Palindromes, where a character is played by eight different actors).
  • Somehow, instances of TUS are even scarcer than those of TUM: I'm Not There, Daaaaaalí!, Perspective, and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.
  • Props to Rawal for being the only actor to have taken on both TUM and TUS!

• Returning to the novel: we noted that TUM is impossible in literature, which has characters but no actors. Still, I’m intrigued by the thought of whether something analogous — a device born from the freedoms of fiction and the suspension of disbelief it can command — could exist on the page. The closest equivalent I can think of is if two (or more) characters in the story were to have the same name. I’d love to hear ideas for what this device could be called, and I’m keen to know if there are any novels that have already used something like this, because I can’t think of any. As it happens, this analogue wouldn’t be as rigidly medium-specific as TUM, since same-named characters with invisible name-level duplicity could appear in films too, akin to how literary narration slid into cinema as the voiceover. I do think it’d take a far defter hand to pull such a move off in prose without confusing readers than the cinematic version does with viewers, because film can stabilise the duplicity with visual cues (hair, posture, costume), but a name offers none of that. On the page, the reader’s mental casting has to carry the entire burden of differentiation.