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Do you look like someone famous? Would you like $50 or £50 or €50? Of course you would. Just before Halloween, a zillion Wonkas descended on Washington Square Park for a Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest that ended with a cameo from Timothée himself (Kylie was a no-show) and handcuffs, as one lookalike was taken into custody. Ever since, a pandemic of lookalike competitions has swept the globe, prompting clusters of men with the vaguest resemblances to our favorite celebrities to gather in parks all over.
London’s Harry Styles event saw 12 foppish men in feather boas, Gucci flares, and floppy haircuts vying for the prize. (The least Harry-alike carried a sack of sugar and a watermelon.) An alarming—and not altogether unhorny—tossed salad of thick thighs, earbuds, and normal people entered the Paul Mescal lookalike contest in Dublin. The Mescal winner said “there’s a Paul Mescal in all of us,” which is allegedly what happens right before the gladiator runs away from you in the park. Yes, (man that looks a teensy bit like a) chef: a shameless Jeremy Allen White doppelganger took the prize without stripping to his Calvins. Bushwick’s Zayn Malik entries were only okay, and the Dev Patel competition in San Francisco was embarrassingly low on uncanny millionaire slumdogs.
The lookalike thing feels like an inoffensive trend—a local frenzy that harms nobody, a deluge of unseriousness. But I can’t help thinking that, culturally, everything is a remake. We’re inundated with remakes—recognizable storylines and premises that repeat the familiar rather than juddering-ly rearrange our worldview. No offence to Timmy, but Dune is a remake, and Mescal’s Gladiator is a revisit. I had a fantastic time at Wicked, but part of its soothing nature was the familiarity, the lack of surprises, the warm bath of knowing where something is going. And I think, in some way, we all want the world to look like the world we already know. The global stage is chock-a-block with harrowing new news and curveball political surprises, every day we scroll through a million real-life jump scares. When searching for reprieve, there’s sanctuary in a movie musical that looks like a Broadway smash, a Colosseum full of vintage brutes, a Harry Styles simile. We already know the winners and losers; the outcome can’t be enough of a shock to keep us awake all night.
As the potent teabag of the Timothée comp gets progressively weaker with each new celebrity dunk, I don’t know what happens next. A Troye Sivan twink-off? An Elon Musk installment? (I’d do a joke here, but I don’t want to get kicked off X… yet.) I would honestly love to see a park full of women who look like the Oompa-Loompa from that “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” in Glasgow. Next on the slate is tomorrow’s Zenday-a-like. I can’t wait to see who thinks they looks like arguably the hottest woman on the planet. All I can say is: Good luck, babes.
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