Stop me if that is on the market,” he says. He scrunches his face and subtly tilts his chin. It’s a acquainted expression—slim eyes, slight grimace, a contemplative wince. But is it his? Or simply one thing mirrored from the person he occurs to look remarkably like?
“We can’t imagine,” he continues, “but, if you could somewhat imagine the idea of no time, no space, infinite distance…” He takes a sip of his Smithwick’s. It’s a Tuesday afternoon on the west facet of Los Angeles. Sitting in a sales space together with his again to the door at a principally empty pub, he nibbles at a Scotch egg and, fairly breezily, unpacks the character of cosmic fluctuations. Also: cosmic duplications. “We are the nothingness and the something at any given moment,” he says.
His sentences have a dreamy high quality to them, and proper now, no less than, he feels like he’s delivering a monologue from the sci-fi thriller Inception. His identify is Ben Cornish, and although he and that movie’s star, Leonardo DiCaprio, have by no means met, Leo is conscious of Ben, and Ben, of course, is conscious of Leo. Ben, like Leo, is an actor. He makes his residing round Hollywood, and infrequently around the globe, popping up at glitzy gatherings in a black tuxedo with slicked-back hair. He provides toasts and poses for selfies with baffled strangers. People who know Leo have texted their well-known good friend photos of this curious man with a confounding resemblance to, properly, him. Like Leo, Ben has mastered the artwork of pretending to be another person. Unlike Leo, Ben is a non-celebrity who lives with a face that’s without delay his and doesn’t belong to him.
Ethan Noah Roy
As he walks alongside Venice Beach, passersby do double takes. That couldn’t have been… proper? It’s been like this for a whereas. There was that point at an Angels recreation when a fan was satisfied that the notoriously personal Oscar winner actually was sitting within the bleachers on the ballpark that day. There was that night at a buddy’s party when a number of ladies at a Chinese restaurant got here as much as have their photos taken with Ben. Some of them even adopted him into the parking zone.
Are any of us really residing distinctive lives as time lumbers by? Perhaps that’s the flawed query.
Ben and Leo had been born three months and three thousand miles aside. Like just about all people, Ben spent years trying to find a sense of identification. Unlike virtually some other human, although, Ben’s identification is intertwined with one of probably the most critically and commercially profitable actors who ever lived. But that wouldn’t have mattered a lot if Ben didn’t wish to be a profitable actor too.
In Venice, after a shirtless man on an e-bike zooms previous us with a large speaker bungee-corded to his rig, executing a Superman-style pose whereas blasting techno music, Ben lets out a little sigh. “That’s what I worry I am when I do my work,” he says. His work today, most of it, no less than, revolves round impersonating a man who goes to nice lengths to be unseen. A person who appears precisely like Ben.
Impersonators play in a markedly completely different league from the comedians who do zeitgeist-y impressions on Saturday Night Live. They’re principally struggling actors. They’re additionally distinct from stand-ins, stunt doubles, and picture doubles (folks twin-like sufficient to seem out of focus in place of an actor to allow them to movie different issues). All of these jobs are half of the precise solid and crew of a manufacturing, working in collaboration with the principal fairly than working in a parallel universe the place a star is none the wiser. Real impersonators disappear into their topic, much less craven than the individuals who costume up in Marvel costumes and bait vacationers for money on Hollywood Boulevard, extra genuine than the fellows who play Santa on the mall for impressionable youngsters.
Ben has turn into shut with some of Hollywood’s best: a Jack Nicholson impersonator, an Austin Powers impersonator, a Margot Robbie impersonator. “We spend half of our lives dreaming and half of our lives awake, and the same goes for our impersonations,” says Evan Ferrante, one of Ben’s closest mates. Ferrante has mastered Tom Cruise’s voice and mannerisms, however their faces are fairly completely different, so he wears large sun shades and a leather-based jacket to intensify the phantasm. “I don’t know where my life begins and Tom Cruise’s ends,” Ferrante says. “Our psyches are definitely merged. It’s like Fight Club a little bit.”
Impersonators amuse and delight, and, typically, they will unsettle. Not all of them adhere to the identical code of ethics when floating by way of the world as another person. Ben avoids outright saying the sentence “I’m Leonardo DiCaprio” until he’s sure his viewers is in on the joke. He has a sharp sense of humour and is charmingly self-deprecating. But he additionally tries to push what he does nearer to the realm of “art” than what you get from easy cosplay. He loathes the thought of being a cardboard cutout, a senseless prop. He desires to create an expertise that a paying shopper will discuss for a very long time. When he’s talking, you possibly can virtually see the gears turning behind his eyes: He’s bending actuality, making an attempt to break down the gap between himself and his character, and himself and his character’s characters.
“Most of my work is living in the liminal zone between me and Leo,” Ben says. At the age of 51, he’s nonetheless within the course of of determining how he ended up on this peculiar area and, for that matter, why he chooses to remain in it.
Ethan Noah Roy
Impersonating, and even conventional appearing, was by no means his plan. Ben grew up in suburban Boston, then went off to Groton for boarding faculty, the place his teenage expertise, or a fictionalised model of it, was immortalised in his classmate Curtis Sittenfeld’s best-selling novel Prep. After lights out, the dorms would tackle, in Ben’s phrases, a Lord of the Flies vibe. Hazing was unavoidable. He gravitated towards visible artwork and have become adept at making human-driven sculptures. From a younger age, he may mould any character that he noticed in his thoughts. He sculpted an exuberant Teddy Roosevelt on safari with a mischievous monkey on his shoulder.
When he was a teenager, School Ties, the 1992 prep-school drama, hit theatres, and Ben was consistently listening to how a lot he regarded like one of the movie’s younger stars, Matt Damon. He by no means actually knew what to say in these conditions.
“Ben is deeply self-critical at times, sometimes almost to the point of a kind of paralysis,” a highschool trainer as soon as wrote in a letter of suggestion. “Some might call this a fault. I see it as the cost of a deeper level of creativity that the more ‘normal’ world doesn’t possess. Because Ben has had quite a bit of early success, both as an artist and a writer (he is almost equally adept in both mediums), he is consumed by the worry that he will not be able to produce work of the same quality again.” It was virtually as if he was competing towards some invisible pressure, each inside and out of doors of himself. The famous-person comparisons didn’t assist.
Not all people will get what’s happening. Some folks earnestly ask about taking pictures particular scenes. One particular person flat-out stated, I don’t imagine you. I believe you’re him.
After school, Ben moved to San Francisco and located a job at a medical-device producer that shared an workplace constructing with American Zoetrope, the manufacturing firm based by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. Coming again from lunch in Chinatown or North Beach, Ben would usually see Coppola sitting at a café desk, eating with a main actor. At the time, Leo was ascendant in Hollywood. “I would notice tourists following me around when I would just be out and about,” Ben recollects. “I’d be out at the bars with friends and people would be staring or coming up.” He was nonetheless type of floating, uncertain of what to do together with his life. After the corporate was acquired, he backpacked by way of Europe, then landed at a dot-com-era startup referred to as Clickability, which despatched him to New York, the place he lucked into an idealised Manhattan existence, residing in a company-owned loft in TriBeCa.
Still, he was stressed. He missed being artistic. He had been toying with the thought of making an attempt to write down a e-book or a screenplay however may by no means get previous his concern of failure. Then, at some point, he signed up for an appearing class at T. Schreiber Studio in Chelsea. As a child, he’d been an adept public speaker and had sung onstage at summer time camp, however now he started to really feel one thing crack open inside of him.
“The first class I was in, it wasn’t even scene study or anything. It was just all of these exercises and theatre games, and even doing that, I would leave those classes feeling…” He searches for the phrases. “It was like I’ve let so much out that I’ve been bottling.”
Not lengthy after, he was on the cellphone with a good friend from Groton, Jute Ramsay, who had been making it in Hollywood as a movie and TV editor. A rent-controlled unit was about to open up in his condo complicated.
“Get on a plane,” Ramsay stated. “Fly out here.”
More than 20 years later, right here’s Ben, peering by way of the wrought-iron gates in entrance of Bungalows de Primos del Mar, within the Hollywood Hills. A plaque affixed to the wall outdoors commemorates how these items “were built in the Silent Film Era and housed Hollywood’s most prominent hopefuls.” Ben nonetheless romanticises the old-Hollywood vibe of all of it. He used to jog previous classic movie-star houses within the space round Beachwood Canyon or hike behind the enormous white letters of the Hollywood signal.
Back then, he labored all method of odd jobs: cater-waiter, daytime bartender, headshot-taker. He took extra appearing lessons, this time at a Meisner program, and auditioned broadly, however elements had been gradual to materialise. An internship at a expertise company received him illustration; one other internship, at a casting workplace, taught him how actors pop when placing auditions to tape. One of the movies he noticed the casting course of for was Synecdoche, New York, which featured Philip Seymour Hoffman and Michelle Williams. The film was written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, recognized for his brain-bending screenplays resembling Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Being John Malkovich, the latter of which is about on a regular basis folks experiencing life by way of the eyes of a movie star. Kaufman had lengthy been one of Ben’s favourites, even earlier than he noticed what was taking form with Synecdoche: a film about an ever-expanding play that collapses the boundary between artwork and life, full with doppelgängers. Ben beloved the way in which Kaufman understood, as he places it, “endless refraction.” This, too, was how he skilled the world.
Ben used to stroll the three-and-a-half-mile loop across the water on the close by Hollywood Reservoir and work out his traces for auditions. One of his first actual bookings was a spot within the pilot for Shameless, working reverse Emmy Rossum. In 2011, he landed a minor position in The Dark Knight Rises, taking part in a stockbroker, and even shared digicam time with the movie’s villain, Bane, performed by Tom Hardy. He couldn’t recover from the scale and element of the set and the way the director, Christopher Nolan, nonetheless made it really feel like an intimate manufacturing.
He knew his traces by coronary heart, however, as a precaution, tapped them into his character’s smartphone in a scene wherein he was getting his footwear shined. Aside from Hardy, Ben’s important scene accomplice was a fellow unknown, who, like him, was good-looking with blond hair. As the hours ticked by, Ben confided within the man, telling him how he at all times will get so anxious every time he’s on set and the way desirous to do a good job consumes him. He remembers how energetic and assured the dude was, how thrilled he was simply to be on set, watching the motion. His identify was Glen Powell.
The film was enormous, however Ben’s profession remained, properly, small. He had a string of minor credit, however substantial elements nonetheless weren’t coming his means. Which is the way it goes for most individuals in Hollywood. Their goals foundering on the shoals of different actors who appear like them, are simply as pedigreed—if no more—and have the luck to get their name. But Ben? Ben regarded precisely like one other man, and that man had a ton of expertise.
He booked a walk-on half on a main community comedy, one with household-name stars. As Ben recollects, he had one of the final pictures of the filming day—a “martini shot.” He spent a while nervously pacing in his trailer, then determined it’d calm his nerves to go wander and meet different actors and extras. Person after particular person stored remarking how a lot he regarded like Leo. The gossip finally made its means across the production-assistant radios and, lastly, to the director, who referred to as him in hours earlier than he was to shoot. He stood there watching the present’s bigwigs look him up and down. They requested him to shave. He messed together with his hair and tried different refined tweaks to make himself look much less like Leo. His name time got here; he shot his scene. But when the episode aired, he discovered he’d been reduce solely. Ramsay, nonetheless working in Hollywood, finally heard the backstory: Ben’s resemblance was too distracting. Now Ben’s head was spinning. How many different occasions had one thing like this occurred?
He was dejected, and the issue was getting worse. As he aged, he started to look much more like Leo. They every have a broad face, piercing eyes framed by crow’s-feet, and a tan, creased brow. What he as soon as seen as a coincidence now appeared like a skilled legal responsibility. But then, in 2012, his agent referred to as with an intriguing alternative.
The Scary Movie spoof franchise was in search of a pretend Leo to parody Dom Cobb from Inception. He put his audition on tape, received the half, and was despatched to satisfy with a vocal coach. Eventually, he was flown top notch to the set in Atlanta. “They’d all been there working and hanging out for weeks, and I show up and then I kind of have to be the person dominating this scene,” he says. The script was being rewritten on the fly. Charlie Sheen was in it. Lindsay Lohan was in it. He was simply making an attempt to maintain up. He fondly remembers a string of post-shooting nights because the movie’s author, David Zucker of Airplane! and The Naked Gun fame, regaled him and others with Hollywood tales on the hotel-lobby bar. He went to the premiere, walked the pink carpet, noticed the movie, learn critiques of his efficiency. “I kind of thought that was a one and done,” Ben says. “And I thought, All right, now back on to other acting gigs. I’ve exorcised the Leo demon.”
Then the calls began coming.
Ben was cautious of doing extra Leo, however on a lark agreed to work a Great Gatsby–themed social gathering in Palm Springs. To put together, he rewatched Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 remake and reread F. Scott Fitzgerald’s e-book.
“I kind of went into it like, ‘Okay, I’m in character. I’m going to be talking about Daisy and the green light, trying to internalise that deep yearning for something that I can never grab, a misplaced yearning for something that is constantly escaping me,’ ” Ben recollects.
As the evening received underneath means, he stood close to the door, hoisted a glass of Champagne, and greeted visitors, uttering variations of “Welcome, old sport!” But after everybody arrived, he had no concept what to do. He finally stood outdoors and gazed out over a golf course at a gentle within the distance, hoping that sinking into Gatsby, or Leo as Gatsby, would make him really feel extra grounded. Some visitors lastly seen that the Leo man was off by himself. They approached him.
Hey there, what are you doing?
“And I was like… ‘Do you see that haunting green light through the fog?’ ”
Crickets.
He realised he wanted to loosen up.
Beyond Ben, the organiser had additionally employed ladies dressed as flappers and had introduced in Susan Griffiths, one of the world’s preeminent Marilyn Monroe impersonators. Griffiths has been taking part in Marilyn for many years: in a Las Vegas revue, in Pulp Fiction, on Nip/Tuck, on Curb Your Enthusiasm. She oozed appeal and glided throughout the room with ease. “I was a little taken aback,” Ben recollects. He stared at her, barely dumbfounded. He lastly understood how folks reacted after they believed him to be Leo.
By then, he’d already been in LA for a whereas. He’d seen celebrities in casting places of work; he’d catered events the place he’d have small interactions with movie icons like Al Pacino. He’d been an additional on The West Wing and spent a rain delay chatting with Martin Sheen. He’d recognized the sensation, the one anybody will get round a actually well-known particular person. “You’ve seen them a million times and you know their face and you kind of feel like you know them, but you don’t know them,” Ben says. “And there’s this kind of tingly thing in your chest, somewhere between excitement and nervousness and depersonalisation. Your circuits kind of cross.” That evening, he actually felt like he was within the presence of Marilyn, who had been lifeless for many years. “I remember walking with her,” he says. “I had her on my arm as we walked through this party. I remember her turning her face to me and it was just like I had that hit. Oh my gosh, I’m with Marilyn.”
Griffiths herself was additionally struck by Ben. As the evening wore on, she took him underneath her wing. He pressed her for recommendation in regards to the impersonation enterprise. “And I remember her asking me a lot of questions,” Ben recollects. “And I was like, ‘Well, I’m an actor and I’ve been in these roles and I want to continue pursuing acting as other people.’” He pulled up his cellphone and confirmed her his headshot. Griffiths responded delicately. That’s going to be a problem.
Ben was as soon as provided to function Leo’s picture double on The Revenant. He weighed the professionals and cons together with his agent. It could be a gruelling, months-long shoot away from L. A. and his spouse, however it could even be a likelihood to study from Leo up shut and to satisfy the director, Alejandro Iñárritu. He was wrestling with a query: Would being a picture double steer him additional away from appearing and auditioning? Ultimately, he and his agent determined to demand a wage they had been positive the producers would by no means pay. They had been proper, and that was that. Leo, in the meantime, would go on to win his first Oscar for the position.
In time, Ben started discovering methods to have precise enjoyable with impersonating. These days, he might be part of a CEO onstage to pump up a gross sales workforce as Jordan Belfort from The Wolf of Wall Street, or evoke Jack on the gilded Titanic banquet. He’s notably good when improvising with a visitor. “You know, a woman can say, ‘I’m over 25, I think I might be a little old for you…’ ” to which Ben will winkingly inform them he may make an exception. But not all people will get what’s happening. Some folks earnestly ask him about particular scenes and what it was wish to shoot them. One particular person flat-out stated, I don’t imagine you. I believe you’re him. Show me your driver’s license. Ben did. The particular person referred to as it a pretend.
He nonetheless has to psych himself up forward of a gig. “Before he leaves for an event, he is often feeling a bit anxious,” Ben’s spouse, Lori, says. What am I doing with my life? he may (jokingly) ask her. Lori and Ben met about 20 years in the past in appearing class and had been mates for a few years earlier than they began relationship. Though she’s since left the business, Lori had the excellence of taking part in one of Brad Pitt’s love pursuits in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The two shared an onscreen kiss. Lori is Ben’s rock, and he or she has a front-row seat to the opposite facet of impersonation: exhaustion. In crowds, she may whisper to her husband, “You’re getting it from three o’clock.” When folks come as much as him and say, “You know who you look like?” she sits by way of what is usually a lengthy, strained pause. Ben is humble, she says, and has stopped answering that query altogether, as a result of he feels awkward suggesting a stranger thinks he’s a lovely movie star. She’s at all times making an attempt to remind him that when he will get house from a gig, he’s energised and excited; that he feels good making folks smile.
But most individuals know that Ben is Ben, not Leo—definitely the folks paying him to seem know. Why, although, accomplish that many appear to love it? What do they really get out of it?
99.999 per cent of us won’t ever meet Leo. But all of a sudden, for a second no less than, it might probably really feel like Leonardo DiCaprio cares about, say, your niece’s volleyball match.
Recently, Ben had a late-night dialog with Ramsay, who helped him perceive that the straightforward act of taking part in Leo was giving different folks permission to momentarily escape actuality too. “It’s coming from your past experiences and how your mind processes movies and TV,” Ben says. “It’s giving everyone that little tickle in their chest.”
Ben’s efficiency is a conduit. Leo is famously personal. At this yr’s Golden Globes, Nikki Glaser joked that the final interview with him she may discover was from when he was a teenager. (His was, in truth, interviewed on this journal final September.) Needless to say that 99.999 per cent of us won’t ever meet Leo, not to mention have a dialog with him. Partygoers might inform Ben about their lives. His family and friends informed me how he’s a particularly good listener, how he could make you are feeling such as you’re the one particular person within the room. Suddenly, for a second no less than, it might probably really feel like Leonardo DiCaprio cares about, say, your niece’s volleyball match. In a world with generative AI, it’s trivial to make Leo seem on a display screen. To get that impact in particular person, you’ve received two choices: Leo, or Ben.
Millions of folks have a uniquely deep emotional attachment to Leo’s films. They bear in mind how previous they had been after they first noticed Titanic or that nostalgic feeling of sitting across the household room watching Catch Me If You Can some vacation weekend. In 2019, Ben purchased a ticket to go see his likeness’s new film, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. Leo’s character, Rick Dalton, is ageing and on the verge of Hollywood leaving him behind perpetually. He spends the movie preventing gravity and the pure forces of the leisure universe. DiCaprio’s efficiency is very lived-in: the delight, the vainness, the insecurity and self-loathing. He runs traces whereas floating in his pool with a large drink the evening earlier than a large shoot. He dunks his face in a bucket of ice water to calm his nerves. “The torture of trying to get through these scenes and forgetting the lines and not getting it right,” Ben says. “You know, it’s him stopping himself. It’s him being his own worst enemy. I can relate.”
In one scene, Dalton retreats to his trailer after a take and beats himself up for a subpar efficiency. “I was sitting there, and it’s crushing. And it’s actually supposed to be somewhat comedic,” Ben says. He knew each emotion Leo was conveying. He himself had been that man. He sat within the theatre sobbing. He’d spent many years being mistaken for Leo and almost seven years taking part in him. Now, for a scene no less than, Leo was taking part in Ben.
Frequently, at gigs, somebody who claims to know Leo presents to introduce the 2 of them. But Ben by no means follows up. He doesn’t must. Yes, he’s impersonating Leo. But at this level, his Leo is simply that—his. He retains tinkering with it—half artwork venture, half science experiment.
Not way back, Ben uploaded a decade’s value of his skilled images into ChatGPT. He informed the AI how a lot he weighed when every picture was taken, then had it consider them towards a library of Leo images. The AI produced a report, together with a four-pound weight vary that will give him a full-enough face but correctly outlined jawline for max believability. Ben discovered the precise color to dye his hair and began accumulating “Leo hairstyle reference photos” to indicate his barber.
His peak was a little trickier to unravel. Naturally, he went searching for shoe lifts. Until he dialled them in, refined however excessive sufficient to get near Leo’s stature, he would periodically have somebody come as much as him and say they thought Leo was taller. The course of taught him one thing attention-grabbing: When he put the lifts on, he felt completely different. They helped him get into character. Height is immutable; what really bought the phantasm was appearing. Ben was perfecting his craft, which is what he’d at all times needed to spend his time doing, going again to that first appearing class in Chelsea, and even earlier, when he was writing or sculpting.
Ben would nonetheless wish to be recognized for his personal work, not merely within the context of another person’s. “He’s told me how frustrated he is, but also, like myself, it’s a necessity thing,” Ferrante, the Tom Cruise impersonator, says. But Ferrante additionally factors one thing out: “We make people happy.”
Throughout our conversations, Ben insists how privileged he feels, how grateful he’s for his relationships together with his spouse, mates, and household, how a lot he appreciates all of the novel alternatives impersonating has introduced his means. He additionally tells me why he’s not dying to satisfy Leo, although he admires him. “What am I trying to get, some sort of seal of approval, or rubber stamp? Okay, I met him. It feels like it’s more about me than it is about him, if that makes any sense,” he says. “If his people were to reach out and be like, ‘Hey, you know what? Leo’s seen some stuff you’ve done, he’d love to sit down for a drink to meet you.’ I’d do that. I’d be flattered. It would be interesting. If that was something that he wanted.”
For now, he’ll simply maintain residing and dealing in an uncanny valley, one wherein his doppelgänger is a generational actor and world movie star who, for no matter motive, exists on the identical second in the identical universe as Ben Cornish, whose Prius is parked out again.
Photographs by Ethan Noah Roy