Most of us are familiar with the idea of stunt doubles in film and television. But there are plenty of other doubles working in the industry, too – for when an actor doesn’t want to do an intimate scene, for example, or doesn’t have the skills required to show their character playing an instrument or driving a car. Here, six body doubles talk about their secret lives on screen.
Michael B Jordan’s twin
Until recently, Percy Bell was a little-known actor living in Nashville, Tennessee – who just so happened to be the exact same height and build as the best actor Oscar winner Michael B Jordan. In 2024, he came across a casting call for a film that turned out to be Sinners. In the film, Jordan plays the twin brothers Smoke and Stack, who often appear on screen together, requiring a double to “play” the other twin.
Bell, 35, had never worked as a double before. He says the experience was “a little bit more rigid” than regular acting roles, as it was more to do with lining up his movements with Jordan’s than with building his own character. Still, he thought deeply about how he was going to play Smoke and Stack, making playlists for both characters to help him embody each role. Funnily enough, one of the songs he had on his playlist for Stack also turned out to be a song Jordan had been using to get into character. “We’re very similar in certain aspects,” he says. “That’s why the chemistry was so good.”
Although Bell can recognise his own back, or side, or whole body when watching Smoke and Stack on screen (his face was replaced with Jordan’s in post-production), he is not too concerned that most viewers won’t realise. “You have to know your role,” he says. “Mine was to help facilitate and create an environment for Michael and everyone else around me to perform at their highest level.” Working so closely with Jordan and the director, Ryan Coogler, “provided me with a really good insight on professionalism and high-level execution of the craft of acting”.
It has been particularly rewarding, he adds, to be part of a project that is doing so well – on Sunday, Jordan won best actor at the Oscars. Being “a part of history” is “not something that I knew that I would be doing when I signed up for the role”, he says. “Certain mornings, I’ll wake up and I’ll see an article – I’m like: ‘That’s crazy!’”
Julia Roberts’s legs
Many readers will be familiar with the poster for Pretty Woman, its stars Richard Gere and Julia Roberts back to back. Except it’s not wholly Roberts in that image – it’s her face, but her body was blended with a photograph of Shelley Michelle. Michelle did all the sex scenes for Roberts’ character, Vivian, in the 1990 film, too. “They wanted her to have curvier legs,” Michelle says. “That’s what the director, Garry Marshall, had in mind.”
After it got out that she had been “the body” in Pretty Woman, Michelle got booked for other roles – doubling for Anne Archer, Candice Bergen, Sean Young and others. Her body became famous: “I got my legs insured for a million dollars with Lloyd’s of London,” she says. Sometimes she was brought in to make a scene “sexier”; sometimes it was for practical reasons (Young, for example, was pregnant when Michelle doubled for her); sometimes it was because actors felt uncomfortable showing certain body parts or performing intimate scenes.
Body doubling is “kind of mechanical”, Michelle says. “They usually have the actors and they’re going to go to kiss and then they say: ‘Cut, put in the body double.’ So then you pick it up from there,” she says. “It’s like: OK, I’m on top of you for four. Now, we’re going to roll for four.”
There have been times when she has felt uncomfortable on set. After arriving to work to perform a love scene, “all of a sudden, 50 crew people come out and they all want to watch it … So I would always request that they close the set to only people who had to be there.” On occasion, the film-makers wouldn’t tell their star that a double was going to be used – which, Michelle says, was dehumanising. “They had to hide me in a trailer,” out of sight, she recalls. “I was like the body they pull out, like a chicken dinner. You know – bring out the breast, bring out the thighs, the legs.”
In 1995, at 28, Michelle launched her own agency, Body Doubles and Parts. She felt that the industry was not giving body doubles enough credit, so she tried to change that, lobbying for a mention in the bylaws of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Eventually, she secured union recognition and “made it so that we were paid a SAG day rate,” plus an extra nudity “bump” if intimate scenes were required: “I could get people up to, like, $2,000 a day for it.”
Now, Michelle is making the most of the way her career panned out – she is working on a tell-all book and a documentary about her body-doubling experiences. When it comes to Hollywood, she says, “I guess you take what you can get”.
Michael Douglas’s hands
“I’m one of those asshole piano players that, whenever I watch a film, I want to make sure that what I hear is what I see,” says the pianist and composer Philip Fortenberry, who is based in Las Vegas. So when he had the opportunity to ensure this was the case, by playing Liberace’s hands in Steven Soderbergh’s 2013 biopic Behind the Candelabra, he jumped at the chance.
Michael Douglas had been cast in the leading role. When Fortenberry turned up on set via the recommendation of a friend, his hands were deemed similar enough for Soderbergh to ask him to start working immediately. “Wait just a minute – I think your people need to talk to my people,” Fortenberry remembers saying. But, having never worked in film before, “I didn’t have any people. So I had to find me some people to actually work this thing out.”
Fortenberry did all the piano-playing in the film, with shots of his hands and back cut with footage of Douglas. A green screen was placed behind his head so that his face could be swapped for Douglas’s in certain shots. For continuity, he had to wear the “exact same jacket” as Douglas – which required him to “slim up a little bit”, since he was a size bigger than the actor. He also wore Liberace’s huge rings, which had to be glued to his hands to stop them clinking on the piano keys. “I really admire that Liberace actually wore those rings and performed in them,” he says. “I can’t stand it!”
The biggest challenge was lining up his playing with the soundtrack, as the pieces weren’t recorded live. “They were really wanting this stuff to be nailed – the pressure was on,” Fortenberry says. Overall, he enjoyed doing it – but it didn’t give him the acting bug: “I would never be an actor. It’s intense, man!”
Rachel Weisz’s hair
In the new Netflix series Vladimir, Rachel Weisz plays a university professor who pursues a younger man while her husband is facing allegations of sexual misconduct at work. There are a number of car scenes, but since Weisz didn’t have a valid driving licence in Toronto, where the series was shot, a local actor, Jacqueline Leventhal, was brought in to be her double. Shots of her hands on the wheel and the back of her head were combined with footage of Weisz performing the same scenes in an identical car that was being towed. “It would drive past us sometimes and we’d be like: ‘Oh look, they’re doing the lines right there,’” Leventhal says. From behind, Weisz’s and Leventhal’s hair looked so similar that “people kept thinking I was her” on set.
“Doubling is a great way to meet some really famous, amazing people,” Leventhal says. As well as doubling for Weisz, the actor has been a stand-in for Shania Twain in an advert, taking the singer’s place while the crew adjusted the lighting and positioning.
She doesn’t mind that viewers won’t know she is in Vladimir. “I kind of love it,” she says – it feels like a fun secret. “The only thing that wasn’t pleasant about it was that they picked a car that didn’t have air-conditioning. So it was quite hot.”
Emma Watson’s back
At nine years old, Flick Miles was scouted via her after-school drama class to be a “shadow Hermione”, featuring in any shot that didn’t require Emma Watson’s face to be visible. This was necessary to keep the filming schedule moving, as, due to British labour laws, the child actors in the Harry Potter films could work for only a few hours each day. Having an almost identical hair colour and jawline to Watson, as well as being a similar size and build, got Miles the gig, she thinks. “A lot of what I did was Hermione talking to Harry and Ron,” she says, with the camera filming over her shoulder while Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint performed their lines.
On one occasion, Miles’s face appeared in a closeup – in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, when Hermione partially transforms into a cat. Watson was allergic to the glue used in the cat makeup, so the face we see in the film is Miles’s. Although Miles enjoyed that moment in the spotlight, she says she never felt jealous of Watson. “Emma had a lot of pressure to be this beloved character, and all the things that come with fame,” she says. “I got to just enjoy it as a child with zero pressure or expectation of me.”
While filming, Miles and the other doubles were treated no differently from the child actors, she says: “We were all children working on the films,” so there wasn’t the sense of a hierarchy that an adult body double might feel. “Emma was lovely. We were really close, especially because, in the earlier films, the cast is quite male-dominated.” Miles and Watson would often be the only girls on set.
Miles laughs at the way she and the other children interacted with the A-list adult actors in the films. “As a child, you have no idea who you’re working with,” she says – the names Maggie Smith and Michael Gambon meant nothing to her back then. “For Comic Relief, we made this magazine and we sold it to the crew for a pound,” she remembers. “We did this interview with Alan Rickman, but the questions we asked him were ridiculous. It was like: ‘How old were you when you had your first girlfriend?’”
The whole experience was “sort of like school”, Miles says: “We were just children being really silly.” And, of course, “everyone had a crush on everyone” – although she won’t say who her particular sweetheart was.
After three films, Miles decided to hang up her Hogwarts robes and finish her stint as a body double. By then, she was ready to have “a bit of normality back” rather than spend most of her time on a film set and receive tutoring rather than attend conventional school. Now 35, she has little to do with the world of film – she works as a journalist – although since 2020 she has been sharing stories from the Potter film set via Instagram and her podcast, Behind the Wand. Harry Potter was “amazing to be part of”, but working in film was “too much hard work” for her to consider as a long-term career: “I need more 9 to 5!”
Andie MacDowell’s hands
Andie MacDowell has been the face of L’Oréal for 40 years – but she is not the hands. Elizabeth Barbour, a 69-year-old lawyer, was working as a hand model in the 1980s when she was brought in to do a TV advert with MacDowell.
This is a relatively common practice in the advertising industry, because actors may not have “hand-model hands” with “long, graceful fingers”, Barbour says. (She also doubled for Isabella Rossellini when the Italian actor was the face of Lancôme.) When Barbour worked as a hand model, she always wore gloves up to her elbows and never cooked or gardened, so the skin on her hands remained “flawless”.
Hand models work in close proximity to actors – applying face cream to their cheeks, for example. “You are right on top of each other,” she says. Being so close to MacDowell wasn’t a problem for Barbour – “she’s just another human being, right?” – but she does admit that she felt “a little bit eclipsed by her … like the country mouse”.
The freeing thing about being a hand model was that she knew she wasn’t going to be in the spotlight. And although hand modelling wasn’t something Barbour wanted to do for ever, “the money was so good”, she says. “It was a great ride.”
