Unpacking our obsession with celebrity lookalikes

WHEN I WAS IN high school, there was a website that told you what celebrity you most closely resembled. It provided my friends and I with hours of entertainment – you took your photo, uploaded it, and moments later, your celebrity lookalike was revealed. Either you were flattered by the result (I got Blake Lively – odd considering I’m a brunette, but who was I to disagree?), or you got someone who didn’t fit with how you thought (or wished) you looked, so you’d upload a different photo and hope for a more placating result. 

No doubt, our obsession with the website was fuelled by teenage vanity. When your sense of self is still a work in progress, being told you look like a Hollywood superstar is validating. 

I thought about this website, and my friendship circle’s fascination with it, when the Timothée Chalamet lookalike competition took place in New York a couple of weeks back. The competition started as a grassroots gathering organised by YouTuber Anthony Po; the prize on offer was $50. But word got out and hundreds of floppy-haired boys with elfin features entered, while the Timothée Chalamet surprised fans by turning up and posing for photos (weird flex). The winner was a 21-year-old guy called Miles Mitchell, who came as Chalamet’s Willy Wonka, top hat and all. 

In the hours following the competition, which was eventually shut down due to its organisers not seeking a public event permit, nothing on my algorithm could compete with coverage of it. And I don’t even think this had everything to do with the real Timmy turning up. Our culture is intrigued not just by the concept of doppelgängers, but by the voyeuristic task of comparing the copy to the original. 

Following the Chalamet lookalike contest, idealistic memes to the tune of ‘Pedro Pascal lookalike competition, tonight, my house’ began to pop up everywhere (my friends and I decided Jacob Elordi would be the protagonist of our make-believe lookalike competition, mainly due to the waves of tall, dark and handsome men his likeness would attract). 

A few days later, on the other side of the world, a Paul Mescal lookalike competition took place in Dublin, prompting hundreds of young, pale men with soft mullets and silver chains to bare their upper thighs in the name of 20 euros, or three pints – but mostly the bragging rights, because thanks to the Chalamet contest, the entire world was watching along on social media. 

The guy who won, Jack Wall O’Reilly, credited his victory to having won “the genetic Paul Mescal lottery”. Sure, he had light brown hair, wore footy shorts, with Apple’s white wire earphones looped around his ears, a Mescal trademark. But would you confuse Wall O’Reilly for the Normal People actor if you saw him in the street? It’s highly unlikely. Perhaps there really is only one Paul Mescal. (Unlike Chalamet, the real Paul Mescal didn’t turn up – he was too busy promoting Gladiator II.)

A London Harry Styles lookalike contest was next, drawing a crowd of around 500 people (most of them young women, save for the guys entering the comp). There were baby-faced One Direction-era Harrys; Harrys with long hair and pearl earrings; guys carrying actual watermelons, presumably a nod to the musician’s 2019 single ‘Watermelon Sugar’. When the winner, 22-year-old Oscar Journeaux – coincidentally also a musician – was asked what he has in common with Styles, he cited his eyes. You could practically hear the crowd sigh. It’s also interesting to note the kind of celebrities who have received lookalike competitions thus far – not only are they all men, but they are all regarded as internet boyfriends. Will we see a similar competition organised for lookalikes of a female star?

Our obsession with celebrity lookalikes is nothing new. But while tribute concerts and celebrity impersonators were once the closest we’d get to the real Elvis, Freddy Mercury or Fleetwood Mac, slapdash lookalike competitions that take place IRL but travel like wildfire across social media seem to be Gen-Z’s answer to an age-old fascination. 

The IRL component is interesting to me. In a world where technology can make anyone look like Pedro Pascal, or sound like Paul Mescal, there’s some deeply human novelty to seeing an actual person whose resemblance to another actual person is uncanny. Especially when that person is a celebrity. 

Meanwhile, I hear there’s a Jeremy Allen White lookalike competition happening in L.A. this weekend. 

Related:

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An evolving list of Timothée Chalamet’s best looks from the set of ‘Marty Supreme’