In his sophomore feature, Twinless, director, writer, and lead James Sweeney locks eyes with Dylan O’Brien across a circle of folding chairs. A moment is had.
The pair are both sitting in a bereavement support group for twins who have lost their other half. Roman (O’Brien) finds comfort in Dennis (Sweeney) as they sweetly go grocery shopping together, attend hockey games, and dress up in matching Sims costumes. Things get batshit crazy and a little dark from there.
It’s a beguiling second outing for the writer-director (not an IRL twin), whose first film, Straight Up, followed a gay and straight pair of friends through the motions of a platonic rom-com. (Sweeney also did triple duty in that flick, starring as the gay half of the duo.) Twinless earned him the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, as well as his first nominations at last weekend’s Film Independent Spirit Awards, for Best Feature and Best Screenplay.
With all its twin idiosyncrasies, Twinless deftly dives into the irrepressible human desire for companionship and belonging as Sweeney and O’Brien’s characters grow by turns codependent and distant. Twinhood becomes shorthand, under Sweeney’s direction, for our most intimate relationships and how maniacal we’re willing to get to sustain them. “Humans are flawed,” he tells CULTURED. “There is absolutely room in the media landscape to have aspirational characters who are likable and always make the morally correct decision, but I don’t find that to be very true to life.”
While working on the film, he gleaned insight into how genetic duos—or “built-in best friends,” as he calls them—move through the world by parsing photographer Mary Ellen Mark’s book Twins, his own past romantic entanglements, and a veritable stampede of twin actors. We unpack them all (twin reenactments included) below.
How did you first become interested in twins?
I started writing the script at the tail of 2015. I’ve always been fascinated by twins, which has become the running joke of this press tour, and I also did date an identical twin. Then I started writing this script after he broke up with me. That resurfaced memories of my childhood fascination with twins. I very much wanted a twin growing up. I moved around a few times, and the idea of having a built-in best friend was very appealing to me. The twin cultural zeitgeist was my childhood between the Olsen sisters and The Parent Trap. The ultimate fantasy was running into a long lost twin that you never knew you had.
Have you heard from that twin that broke up with you, like, “I see that you’ve put out an interesting movie after we broke up.”
I have not, but I await his call if and when he’s ready.
How did Dylan O’Brien join the project?
I used to work in casting as my day job, so I just try to track actors generally, especially in this age range. I remember sending a note to my casting director because we were discussing options at the time, and at first I thought Dylan would be casting very much against type. It was so different from my perception of him. Now knowing him, and obviously having worked on this film with him, it’s like, he is so both of these characters. I can’t imagine anyone else playing it. But that’s the beauty of casting, is ultimately you find the right person and it sort of eradicates any other version of the movie in your mind.
What was the conversation like with him about creating the two very different characters he plays, as Roman and his twin, Rocky?
As an actor he is sort of a unique blend of being a quote-unquote more traditional leading man who has a very charismatic personality and can, I think, carry a film based on that alone, but his greatest strength is actually his chameleon-like quality. He’s a true character actor, and he has so much vocal and physical versatility that is quite rare in any actor. To have those two things together is quite formidable.
I know you were looking through Mary Ellen Mark’s photographs of twins while making this. How did you discover her book?
Are you familiar with the cocktail party effect? It’s a psychological phenomenon where you’re in a room and it can be really loud, but if somebody says your name even across from the room, you’ll be like, Oh, that’s my name. My aunt Kathy and her husband, they have like 1000 books in their New York apartment. The guest room is just filled with books, and I just saw the word “twins.” It leaped out at me. [Twins] is mostly photographs by Mary Ellen Mark, but then at the back there’s these anecdotes from interviews of all these people attending the Twins Days Festival, in Twinsburg, Ohio, which is an annual festival where twins from all around the world gather and celebrate. I just felt like this book was made for me.
There’s so many twins in here. This is the one that really made me cry [a man named John talking about his late brother]. I’ll read you an excerpt from it. I’m just going to do voices, so you know who’s talking, so I apologize in advance.
Mary Ellen: So the two of you were close. He didn’t really get married because you kind of took care of each other?
John: That’s right. We had a friendship between us, but we wanted to marry twins, and some of the twins was way too high class for us, for one thing.
Mary Ellen: How would you decide between you and your brother which girl to marry if they were twins?
John: The youngest one would marry the youngest one.
Mary Ellen: Did you sleep in the same room?
John: Oh yeah, we slept in the same bed.
Mary Ellen: As older men, did you sleep in the same bed?
John: Yes, to the point before he passed away. Yes, it’s a good old fashioned bed we have. We still have the beds that my mother and father used.
We actually did get one reaction in a test screening note. Someone thought it was incredulous that in the hotel bedroom scene [Roman and Dennis] would share a bed and sleep together. I had written that in the script already when I came across this. Like, I’m vindicated, twins sleep together.
Here’s Debbie and Lisa. She said, “Most people are born into an I world, and Lisa and I were born into a we world.” There’s a line in Twinless where Rocky says, “I was we and now I’m I.” I must have taken it from this.
I like that this is like the twin Bible.
I keep it on my coffee table. I wrote a couple other things down that I may or may not have stolen.
Mary Ellen: If you had three wishes, what would the first wish be?
Paula: To die together. We got so much attention when we were young, because if you’re a singleton, you don’t really stand out, but with us being twins and having curly red hair, everybody made a big fuss over us being so alike.
I’m sure I’ve heard the word “singleton” in other places, but to hear them use it, I just thought that was so special.
These are the most eloquent random interviews I’ve ever heard. And it’s crazy how similar they still look as adults.
Well, they’re also all wearing matching outfits. I don’t know if that’s what everyone does [at the festival]. I think people who go to the Twins Days Festival, it’s a bit of a self-selective crowd. We tried to do an event there last year ahead of our release. I thought we could do a premiere there, but they weren’t interested. I’m hoping maybe one day in the future they’ll invite us for an anniversary screening.
Do you feel like you haven’t been accepted by the twin community?
No, the opposite. I feel like, if anything, so many twins have self-identified either at screenings or journalists or sliding into my DMs and, no offense to the singletons, but the twin vote counts the most.
Looking through the photos in the book really reminds me of the scene where your character is walking down the street and all of a sudden he’s surrounded by twins all wearing the same outfits.
That was a fun casting challenge of trying to find a lot of twins in Portland. I remember we came back actually from scouting that location. It was just me and my DP. We parked outside the Airbnb. I go, “Are those twins?” They were just like walking on the street. I run out of the car. I’m like, “Hi, I’m so sorry. Are you identical twins? So weird, but I’m casting a movie.” They’re like, “We’ve seen the flyers,” and I didn’t know there were flyers. So I was very excited about that. The one twin was like, “I’ve got work,” but the other one is like, “No, I want to do this,” and he twisted his arm. They’re the ones eating the cookie [in the film]. That was my first time street casting.
I imagine if they’re all Portland twins, you must have cast every twin in the city.
No, there were more actually. All the actors in the support group were also twins, even the background talent. I remember showing up that day—casting had sent me a PDF of all the people to approve, and there were a couple of people that I didn’t recognize [in the room]. I’m like, “Oh, who’s that? I don’t remember them from the PDF.” They’re like, “Well, some of the twins that you requested didn’t want to show up because they didn’t want to have to imagine their twin being dead. We just invited some non-twins, but we’ll send the non-twins home. We have enough people.”
Oh, god.
Like, I didn’t even think about that, that’s so awful. Normal twins aren’t normally surrounded by a bunch of other twins unless you’re going to, you know, this event in Ohio. It’s just really surreal to hear all of them talk and share their own twin experiences with each other. It was a really cool vibe on set that day.
Did you get to lift anything from them, any anecdotes?
Nothing that made it into the film. But one thing that I remember is Cree, who plays Bianca, when we Zoomed, she was so excited because she’s a twin. I don’t think she knew beforehand that we were trying to cast all twins for the support group. So when she showed up there, she felt like she had a leg up on the other actors, but then she discovered that not only was everyone else a twin, everyone else was an identical twin, and she was the only fraternal. That was really funny.
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