The Social Network, the film about the rise and rise of Mark Zuckerberg, also tracks his relationship (or lack of) with the Winklevoss twins, the rowing twins of Harvard who claimed Zuckerberg stole their idea, which resulted in a $65 million settlement. Watching The Social Network, the pair look like twins. Identical twins, but not carbon copies. Skip to the credits, and there’s two different actors named. So how did they do it?
Quite unbelievably, the Winklevoss twins are different actors, Josh Pence and Armie Hammer, who don’t look very much like twins at all. After searching for a suitable set of twins, and failing to find them, The Social Network director David Fincher turned to digital means.
To turn two different actors into one set of twins, The Social Network filmed every Winklevoss scene twice. Josh Pense plays the body of the twins, and Armie Hammer plays the face. Each scene with the Winklevoss twins was filmed with roles switched, then the face of Hammer was digitally grafted onto the body of Pense, and voila, you’ve got a perfect pair of rosy cheeked, blonde haired blue-eyed strapping rowers.
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If you’ve seen The Social Network you won’t have even realised that the pair are not a bona fide set of twins, or that there’s any digital manipulation gone on at all, it’s completely flawless. Poor Archie Pense though – since you don’t see his face at any point in the film, he misses out on his own photo gallery on The Social Network website, whereas Archie Hammer, the face, gets a slideshow. Props to Steve Rose at The Guardian for digging this up.
Have you seen The Social Network? Did you notice any digital manipulation? Drop us a line in the comments!
[via The Guardian]
