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You Look Just Like...

gattino

Justified & Ancient
Joined
Jul 30, 2003
Messages
2,515
I was going to add this to the end of the Doppleganger thread, but it's only tangentially related (though may explain some of my own doppleganger incidents of strangers mistaking me for multiple different acquaintances of theirs or people online asking me if they saw me in such and such a shop earlier).

The other day a stranger informed me I looked like the actor Matt Damon. Let me be very clear I look absolutely nothing like the actor Matt Damon and no one has ever suggested it previously, with good reason. The relevance of this unsolicited nonsense is that it brings the total of my alleged celebrity lookalikes way into double figure. I'm pretty sure I've lost track of some of them. But its always strangers feeling a compulsion to inform me, whether i was already in conversation with them or not. Some are very flattering comparisons. Some are distinctly not. Some are repeated multiple times by different people. Some are totally out of left field one offs..such as Matt Damon and the possibly tipsy heavy built man I passed in the street a few weeks ago in the middle afternoon who smiled an acknowledgement and then threw in as I overtook him "You look like Rick Astley!"

From my teenage years in school until now I have been informed by enthusiastic strangers that I look just like....(Asterisk indicates multiple accusers):

Kevin from The Wonder Years. Charlie Chaplin. Uri Gellar Simon Cowell. Eric McCormack from Will and Grace*. Frankie Dettori. Joseph Fiennes. Hal Sparks from Queer As Folk USA*. Henry "The Fonz" Winkler*. Mika. Aiden "Little Finger"Gillen from Game of Thrones. Mario Cantone from Sex and The City. Kevin Bacon (!!). Tom Cruise. Rick Astley. "The doctor from Grey's Anatomy". Matt Damon.

Some of these have some obvious traits in common.. a head of dark hair, a generic "american" jawline, or a gaunt face. But others are gloriously random, and always with a great sense of compulsion to tell me.

I'm sure eventually they'll get around to Barbara Bush and Kanye West.

Throw in my "real life" doubles - a Mark, a Dave, a Steve, some deaf taxi driver, and someone known to various lady shop assistants around Liverpool and there's surely some insight into many examples of alleged dopplegangers. Some of us perhaps have chameleon faces...and many more of us have great difficulty in distinguishing some key feature of an individual from their overall appearance.

So, for the sake of a question.. can anyone outnumber me in alleged lookalikes?
 
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No I can't.

For most of my life I have been told that I look like Bryan Ferry.

I put a stop to it though by moving to a country where no one has heard of Roxy Music.

Weekend before last however I was back in the "first world" visiting Berlin and a bloke in a bar didn't just tell me I looked like Bryan Ferry, he asked me if I was Bryan Ferry!

Considering Bryan is approximately 20 years older than me I suspect what the bloke in the bar was really asking was ... "are you that Bryan Ferry from the 1980s and 1990s even though it is 2018?"

I have never associated Bryan Ferry with time travel but I do now.
 
I was going to add this to the end of the Doppleganger thread, but it's only tangentially related (though may explain some of my own doppleganger incidents of strangers mistaking me for multiple different acquaintances of theirs or people online asking me if they saw me in such and such a shop earlier).

The other day a stranger informed me I looked like the actor Matt Damon. Let me be very clear I look absolutely nothing like the actor Matt Damon and no one has ever suggested it previously, with good reason. The relevance of this unsolicited nonsense is that it brings the total of my alleged celebrity lookalikes way into double figure. I'm pretty sure I've lost track of some of them. But its always strangers feeling a compulsion to inform me, whether i was already in conversation with them or not. Some are very flattering comparisons. Some are distinctly not. Some are repeated multiple times by different people. Some are totally out of left field one offs..such as Matt Damon and the possibly tipsy heavy built man I passed in the street a few weeks ago in the middle afternoon who smiled an acknowledgement and then threw in as I overtook him "You look like Rick Astley!"

From my teenage years in school until now I have been informed by enthusiastic strangers that I look just like....(Asterisk indicates multiple accusers):

Kevin from The Wonder Years. Charlie Chaplin. Uri Gellar Simon Cowell. Eric McCormack from Will and Grace*. Frankie Dettori. Joseph Fiennes. Hal Sparks from Queer As Folk USA*. Henry "The Fonz" Winkler*. Mika. Aiden "Little Finger"Gillen from Game of Thrones. Kevin Bacon (!!). Tom Cruise. Rick Astley. Matt Damon.

Some of these have some obvious traits in common.. a head of dark hair, a generic "american" jawline, or a gaunt face. But others are gloriously random, and always with a great sense of compulsion to tell me.

I'm sure eventually they'll get around to Barbara Bush and Kanye West.

Throw in my "real life" doubles - a Mark, a Dave, a Steve, some deaf taxi driver, and someone known to various lady shop assistants around Liverpool and there's surely some insight into many examples of alleged dopplegangers. Some of us perhaps have chameleon faces...and many more of us have great difficulty in distinguishing some key feature of an individual from their overall appearance.

So, for the sake of a question.. can anyone outnumber me in alleged lookalikes?

I've not been taken for anyone famous but, as many on here , I've found myself in some weird and wonderful situations. I've been mistaken for a vicar(!), police officer, GP, Consultant, Anaesthetist, Solicitor, barrister,judge, councillor, counsellor, mechanic,car salesman and others. Always thought I'd make a good con man, were it not for this dratted conscience.
 
No, I only have a couple. In the 1980s I was at a party and two women were staring at me all evening. I thought I'd done something to piss them off, but eventually one approached me tentatively and apologised for staring all night but said she and her friend wondered if I was Juliet Stevenson. I did look like her then but sadly, no more.

The other one, many years later, about a decade ago, in a bookshop my husband found a Victoria Wood book, specifically the one with this cover.

And he couldn't stop looking at it because he actually thought it was me. And I did at that time indeed look exactly like that. Very odd as generally I never looked a bit like her, just in that picture.

I had an ex once who told me that after we split up, he went out with a random woman he met at a party because she looked exactly like me.

My other lookalike was my old neighbour who was, like me, from farming stock and had ancestors back to the first page of the local parish records - as do I. Both our surnames appear on the same page. But all the farmers round here are inbred, so maybe no surprise.

Husband has had flattering ones. When he was a postie, his entire office used to call him Brad Pitt, and not (he claimed) satirically. In later life he looks pretty well identical to Jurgen Klopp. When he was young and did the hippie grand tour of Europe with his mates, he said in some countries he was spat at and called a rude word for 'German' so that kind of figures. I guess he is just very Anglo Saxon. Or something.
 
Many years ago a young lady said I looked like a cross between Richard Gere and Omar Sharif. Mind you, she was trying to sell me a house at the time (the flattery didn't work).

In more recent years, I've been described as looking very much like Jurassic Park era Jeff Goldblum.
 
In the late 80s and early 90s, I was mistaken for Ian Broudie of The Lightning Seeds. A couple of years later, I was told I looked like Ben Elton and David Baddiel. While in Australia in the mid-90s, someone said I looked like Aussie comedian Andrew Denton (no, me neither).
Then, nothing for years, until about a year ago, a girl in a record store said I looked a bit like Thom Yorke from Radiohead!
 
Apart from editing to add a few more to the original list ive just thought of anotehr real life one. 20 odd years ago a few different people suggested when seeing a photo of a particular australian friend of mine that I looked like him. A fact i was happy to draw his attention to as it was rather flattering to me given at the time he was something of a matinee idol young doctor with muscles bigger than my head. He didn't see any resemblance at all and i was only pretending to. 20 years later and the friend is now more of a distant aquaintance and - im trying to be accurate not unkind - time and the australian sun has transformed him so i'd not necessarily be as flattered as I was back then. So imagine the bitter irony when loading a photo of myself on Facebook the website suggested I tag HIM instead of me.....
 
Many years ago a young lady said I looked like a cross between Richard Gere and Omar Sharif. Mind you, she was trying to sell me a house at the time (the flattery didn't work).

In more recent years, I've been described as looking very much like Jurassic Park era Jeff Goldblum.


giphy.gif
 
Many years ago a young lady said I looked like a cross between Richard Gere and Omar Sharif. Mind you, she was trying to sell me a house at the time (the flattery didn't work).

In more recent years, I've been described as looking very much like Jurassic Park era Jeff Goldblum.
Had you thought about a career in films?
 
In the late 80s and early 90s, I was mistaken for Ian Broudie of The Lightning Seeds. A couple of years later, I was told I looked like Ben Elton and David Baddiel. While in Australia in the mid-90s, someone said I looked like Aussie comedian Andrew Denton (no, me neither).
Then, nothing for years, until about a year ago, a girl in a record store said I looked a bit like Thom Yorke from Radiohead!
I was told I looked a bit like Ben Elton too, but that was really to do with my hairstyle at the time. A change of hairstyle, and I was told I looked like Dean Cain.
 
Nobody. As I've mentioned before, I am VERY plain. Nobody who looked like me in any way would make any kind of living in the entertainment profession.

I do, however, have a great face for radio and probably resemble many radio people, but then since nobody knows what they look like...
 
I am always being told I resemble someone. I used to be told I looked like Terry Christian a lot, also Jools Holland quite a bit and occasionally... Johnny Depp. I was once told I looked like Ken Hom and went through a phase of being told I looked like Gok Wan. I can't see much similarity between them myself. Funnily enough, just the other day I was told I looked like Danny Wallace. I think it may be the glasses. Personally I don't think I resemble any of them...

Is it even possible to look like all those people?
 
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Other than the footballer Dennis Berkamp and the director Jorg Buttgeriet (that one's uncanny), someone once told me I looked like Schwarenegger .. not because of my physique but because I had big lumpy eyebrow flesh (I don't know the correct term) .. so an unfortunate side effect of that was that sometimes strangers would think I was giving them 'evils' .. it became such a problem at one point that I had a rehearsed reply when challenged "I'm not frowning at you, it's just my face .. sorry .. I get this all the time" *pointing at lumpy eyebrows* .. so basically I look Germanic ..

aeyebrows.jpg
 
Other than the footballer Dennis Berkamp and the director Jorg Buttgeriet (that one's uncanny), someone once told me I looked like Schwarenegger .. not because of my physique but because I had big lumpy eyebrow flesh (I don't know the correct term) ..
Hooded eyes?
 
Swifty, I do believe that's called the brow ridge.

Many years ago, I heard Dick Cavett say that when he was a boy he often got in trouble at school with his teachers in class because he always looked like he was smiling when he wasn't.

I wonder if it's worse to look like you're always smiling or always frowning.
 
Swifty, I do believe that's called the brow ridge.

Many years ago, I heard Dick Cavett say that when he was a boy he often got in trouble at school with his teachers in class because he always looked like he was smiling when he wasn't.

I wonder if it's worse to look like you're always smiling or always frowning.
Both are probably a bit of a challenge I suppose.
 
It's a bit off-topic, but I wonder if the reactions one gets from others if one always appears to be smiling or frowning help shape personality over time...Dick Cavett initially went into comedy. Hmmm.
 
It's a bit off-topic, but I wonder if the reactions one gets from others if one always appears to be smiling or frowning help shape personality over time...Dick Cavett initially went into comedy. Hmmm.
Although being cursed with 'hard man' looking bow ridge (even though I'm soft as shit) so being challenged by tough men and unfortunately historically attracting women who seem to be into hard men, I've accidentally been credited with being a hard man in the past, been put in security roles etc .. my personality is still soft as shit but I could see people with either tough face or funny face or whatever else possibly following that path of what people expect ..
 
Back in the 90s when Chris Evans show TFI Friday was first on Channel 4 he used to have segment highlighting people with strange talents and quirks. One such I recall was someone who looked like 20 (or 12, or some large number anyway) different people. The bloke was in the studio smiling down the camera while they did a split screen in which they showed and counted down all his celebrity dopplegangers. I remember it distinctly as he genuinely somehow looked like each and every one of them even though you'd not have claimed that the celebs looked like each other. I remember the list included Kevin Keegan, Sacha Distel and Ian McShane..and he was the spit of each of them and many many more.
 
Although being cursed with 'hard man' looking bow ridge (even though I'm soft as shit) so being challenged by tough men and unfortunately historically attracting women who seem to be into hard men, I've accidentally been credited with being a hard man in the past, been put in security roles etc .. my personality is still soft as shit but I could see people with either tough face or funny face or whatever else possibly following that path of what people expect ..
Or maybe some people go the opposite way to convince others they're not the way they look. (Although I think it would be a mistake for someone with Dick Cavett's problem to try going into a field like undertaking, where a person needs to be able to look appropriately serious!) For instance, maybe someone who looks naturally like he's frowning would go out of his way to be friendly in social situations.

To bring the topic back to the original post, I also wonder if those who are constantly told they look like a famous person end up identifying with that person.

For example, my favorite actress is Meryl Streep. (Well, actually, she's tied with Katharine Hepburn.) Is that because she's such a fabulous actor, or do I identify with her somehow because people tell me I look like her?

[However, these musings of mine are not terribly Fortean, are they?]
 
To bring the topic back to the original post, I also wonder if those who are constantly told they look like a famous person end up identifying with that person.

For example, my favorite actress is Meryl Streep. (Well, actually, she's tied with Katharine Hepburn.) Is that because she's such a fabulous actor, or do I identify with her somehow because people tell me I look like her?

[However, these musings of mine are not terribly Fortean, are they?]
Au contraire. The power of suggestion is, I suggest, an eminently Fortean topic.
 
You definitely have a point!

I'm also tempted to start another thread about people who end up with careers that mirror their names. For instance, I recently came across a chef whose last name is Cook. I've always wondered in cases like this whether the names influence their vocational choices...

But maybe I should wait until the new incarnation of this board materializes?
 
You definitely have a point!

I'm also tempted to start another thread about people who end up with careers that mirror their names. For instance, I recently came across a chef whose last name is Cook. I've always wondered in cases like this whether the names influence their vocational choices...

But maybe I should wait until the new incarnation of this board materializes?
You may enjoy this thread, then.
 
People sometimes tell me I look like the actor Cillian Murphy. I don't see it. I did once sit quite near him at a concert and as an experience it was not akin to looking in the mirror.
 
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