Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, though that seems unlikely: two guys walk into a twin bereavement support group and uncover an unexpected rapport. Before long, they’ve formed a friendship that—somewhere between mutual healing and toxic codependency—leaves them considering, and quietly hoping, that they’ve somehow stumbled back across their other halves.
To say much more about “Twinless” beyond that premise would be to deprive audiences of the magnificently unexpected twists and turns that writer, director, and star James Sweeney has up his sleeves; his wicked, sharp-witted comedy is about grief and friendship but also something more shocking and peculiar. Suffice it to say that Twinless draws out of the dynamic between its lead characters an alternately endearing and unsettling look at the lengths we’ll go to feel less agonizingly alone with ourselves.
What keeps the film so addictively entertaining, as it so deftly executes a series of slippery, psychosexual reveals, are the darkly compelling lead turns from both Sweeney and Dylan O’Brien, who—playing twins who exist on opposite ends of the personality spectrum—deliver a pair of performances as plausibly lived-in as they are entirely distinct. “Twinless”—in theaters Sept. 4 from Roadside Attractions—played at this year’s Chicago Critics Film Festival, with Sweeney and O’Brien in attendance for a post-film Q&A. At the sold-out May 3 screening, one of the hottest tickets anywhere at the festival, the duo introduced the film together—as in simultaneously, their oddball chemistry on full display as they spoke in unison, playfully matching each other’s rhythms and emphases to the audience’s clear delight.
Up the street from the Music Box Theatre, as the screening took place, RogerEbert.com sat down with Sweeney and O’Brien to discuss forging their own friendship, wearing various hats on the set of this independent film, and unpacking dichotomies of masculinity on screen.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
You two first met over Zoom before making “Twinless” together. How did you go about building the intimate level of trust and synchronicity that these roles required?
James Sweeney: I mean, on one hand, you can’t really force it.
Dylan O’Brien: You can’t predict it. You are taking a chance. It’s such a dice roll. Even having spoken quite a bit and been in contact before we got rolling, you still don’t know. It is such a different ecosystem when you get on set, and the energies are such that it’s a really intense process, obviously. Luckily, our journey continued to unfold in these beautiful evolutions, and much of that happened during the course of filming. We continued to turn the page and evolve.
JS: Even from the initial casting perspective, I had heard he had a really great reputation. Part of what I was looking for, because I was wearing so many hats, was somebody who could be a partner in crime, somebody that I wouldn’t feel intimidated being honest with and having difficult conversations with. Especially on a low-budget indie, you want somebody who’s in it. Another actor might have abandoned it once we couldn’t get financed after two years, but I think that’s a testament to how much Dylan connected with the character, with the story, and to who he is as a person. We were on this journey together for so long; we would have liked to have filmed it sooner. However, on the opposite end of the spectrum, we’re happy it happened at the time and in the way it did, because I think it allowed our process to grow organically.
DO: It really blossomed through that. It’s true that I would always say to James, “I revisit this script, at least annually—when we weren’t getting it made—to freshen my take on it.” Each time, it would still be my absolute favorite script I’ve read; it stood the test of time. That’s a testament to the piece of material, and I never lost sight of that.
Having the complete script in front of you is such a gift as an actor, allowing you to explore the nuances of individual scenes while still having visibility of the entire piece. You’ve been around plenty of franchise and studio projects where I can’t imagine that is the case.
DO: It was such a breath of fresh air to read this complete piece of material. So often that’s not how it goes. It’s ironic too, for the bigger things you’re reading that—if anything—you’re given less. For the new Star Wars or Marvel projects, you have to send a tape from general casting. There’s no script. They sent generic [audition] sides that they wrote yesterday, and there’s no information about the character. You do have to sign a 10- to 15-year contract, and you’re also obligated to star in multiple movies — and you’re just like, “What? What are you talking about? How am I supposed to do this? They want to see how I sound and look, so I’ll send a tape of myself talking, and then we’ll go from there?”
The person that I am, I devoured and appreciated the completeness of this material. Obviously, some things changed, but James invited me into that process. As he had said earlier, I was also game to be a part of that process. That’s how I like to operate, anyway. We got rid of our trailers; we cut those for the budget.
JS: Well, they wouldn’t let us get rid of that one trailer… but we gave it to [co-star] Tasha Smith.
DO: Right, as our supporting cast was coming in, we’d cycle them in and out of it. But that’s not how I work; I don’t fuck off to my trailer. I need to be soaking up the entire energy of the experience. We connected on that a lot.
To your point about wearing so many hats, James, you wrote this film, then you directed it, produced it, and starred in it. Dylan, you produced “Twinless” as well as starring in it. How did it change the experience for you both to be working in multiple roles on set?
JS: I had done that in my first feature, [“Straight Up,”] as well, but this was a step up in terms of scale. It was my first time working with everything union-related. There were definitely times where I would lean on Dylan, because he’s so much more experienced than I am; especially as a producer, he could say, “No, we can ask for this. This is important. Let’s take time here, because this is ultimately what we’re here to do.” I get asked a lot how I both act and direct, but the most challenging thing for me, personally, was producing and directing, because I feel like those are the two disciplines most at war with each other. [laughs]
DO: 100 percent. Your producer, typically, is the conduit from you to all the stresses you don’t want to be troubling your artists with, essentially. When we had the meat of those roles in this scenario, it’s interesting because we’re aware of all the stresses. James is dealing directly with all the stresses that you would usually have somebody there to absorb, by design. I totally see how that would be the more difficult marriage.
JS: And we did have a wonderful on-set producer, David Permut. But, at this scale, it’s not normal for the loans to be under my name. [laughs]
DO: It was still DIY and indie in every sense of the word. But, still, you’re making stuff. Again, we’ve all, in some capacity, been doing this since we were kids. James has made a bunch of shorts; I grew up filming with myself, my friends, and whoever I could rope in. As James said, the scale does increase at some point. I was happy to be empowered at this point in my career to utilize my experience and the sense of production that I had gained at that point, the hours on set that I had under my belt that I felt I could utilize at that point, in that role. I was really excited to do that, and it was exciting to see the crew get behind us. These 30-year-olds made something, and it was cool to see the crew see what we were doing and trust us, to feel like we knew what we were doing.
JS: We did this around-the-table shot, and I remember how excited the camera crew got about that. There was a lot of goodwill. The Portland crew was phenomenal. That’s also a testament to how they approach film generally; they care about the craft, but also the tone we try to establish, because it starts from the top down. We all really cared about this. We got greenlit two weeks before the WGA strikes, so some of those heads of department had been waiting for quite a while, in limbo. We were all in it together.
James, I’m struck by how comprehensively you weave concepts of duality and mirroring throughout this film, both visually and structurally, as well as through the story itself. So much of “Twinless” feels like a dissertation on the psychology of twinning. You’ve said in the past that “twin curiosity” was where this started for you. Can you expand on that?
JS: My history of twin fascination comes from growing up with twins being very much in my cultural zeitgeist. And I also dated an identical twin. [nervous laugh]
DO: [breaks down laughing]
JS: In terms of how the theme of duality permeates throughout the visual grammar and the structure of the film, some of that is down to lessons learned from my first film, in terms of how I like to work. I had so much time to workshop how I wanted to track this, because it took so long to get made and because I’m wearing so many hats; I feel the more prepared I am, the easier it is for me to allow room for spontaneity when I’m filming. But I like to go in with a clear agenda and a visual grammar. I’m always trying to balance not letting the academic part of my brain overtake the story, because I’m ultimately trying to create an emotional narrative, but I feel like, through everything, I’m trying to serve the theme. [to O’Brien] You make fun of me.
DO: There are so many of these filmmaker nods. He’s always placing something in frame; he’s a filmmaker like that, which I do feel like is a dying breed, or at least that it’s rare. I have worked with much more experienced filmmakers to whom that shit doesn’t even occur. He’s that kind of artist, that kind of mind…
JS: It’s the fun part for me.
DO: And it’s delightful to work with. I would genuinely get excited to come to set and find little Easter eggs that you’d planted in, to figure out why my costume was a certain way for that scene. He thinks about every little detail, you know?
What you’re describing, I think, accounts for the tonal elasticity. The film is spring-loaded as this Hitchcockian suspense thriller, but the psychological ambiguity of this central relationship is wedded to the intimacy and connection you feel between them. “Twinless” has this emotional clarity about how gut-wrenchingly painful the loss of a loved one, or a sibling, would feel; it’s serious and sincere, yet it never becomes detached from the comedy, absurdity, and mystery of what’s going on with these characters. For a film this tonally tricky, do you find that first in the writing? Is it distilled in filming or in nuances of performance? Tell me about that process.
JS: I mean, that’s a great question. I’d say it definitely starts with the script, and I’m trying to fine-tune it to ensure it feels cohesive. I write more comedically, and I direct more like a drama, if that makes sense. A lot of what you’re doing as a director is good hiring; starting with Dylan, he’s somebody I know, as an actor, who has so much versatility in his comedic and dramatic range. I trust that he can thread all those tones with finesse. He’s playing two different characters, but it won’t feel like it’s two different movies.
Likewise, with Jae-il Jung’s score, I felt like it was so important to have duality even within the score, because we were doing both organic-instrumental as well as something synthetic, which an audience might not be able to decipher audibly, but that lets you know that there’s something a little bit different and unexpected, tonally, in the film. But the score didn’t come until the very last stage, so we were using temp tracks in the beginning; a lot of it’s fine-tuning in editing.
I also like to do a lot of takes, as a director, because if I’m not exactly sure where something’s going to land, I want the flexibility to have fluctuations. Then again, sometimes you’re doing oners, so you have to commit and trust that if it feels honest on set, it’ll come through in the edit.
DO: You can talk about it in the context of going from your first film to this; it’s a complete fucking 180 in terms of genre, tone, pace, but in terms of finding all of these nuanced, cinematic ways to hold the audience in that emotionality, reminding them of where we are, there was something to that pace. Always, we were on the same page of how these characters would approach these exchanges. It wasn’t rapid-fire. They were both taking time in this scenario, this world, this story.
Then we’d sometimes ask, “Are we going too slow?” Since we feel confident that we’ve got it, we’re happy with some of the work we’ve been doing. Let’s tighten it up a degree so that it helps when we’re trying to shave minutes down in the cut without compromising the pace. We were finding seconds to lose.
JS: There was a moment in the first scene in the diner, where Dylan had a piece of a sandwich stuck in his teeth; that wasn’t scripted, but it felt so right for that moment. It’s all a leap of faith. Honestly, when people asked me, at the script stage, what my tonal references were, that was hard to answer, because I’m not modeling any one specific influence but pulling from a lot of different ones. When you don’t have a clear blueprint, it makes you feel like it might not work, but I always felt that, if the story itself worked, the movie would work.
DO: Going back to the things I feel so grateful for with this process, all the incalculable and magical things that take place while making something, there are so many people who didn’t get this script—actually, most, I would say—
JS: [aghast] What do you mean? We sent it to over 100 financiers!
DO: Like, in terms of people who didn’t understand it. I know they received it.
JS: Oh! I was like, “Everyone passed on it! Are you kidding?”
DO: No, that’s what I’m saying, baby. But you and I, two people who had never met before, we understood it. You had written something I fundamentally understood. And then, it’s really funny, because we could have shown up to set, and you could have realized, “Oh, he totally doesn’t get it. He’s in a different movie.” But we were on the same page, we were on the same plane, and it was a plane that, in a way that we both loved, didn’t already exist. We didn’t have a point to reference. It is hard to explain to the town or explain to the people that you’re trying to get to make it. They want to hear you point to something already successful and say, “This is what it is.”
JS: And we forgive them. [smiles] For their ignorance.
DO: [laughs] It’s ironic in this industry, where we continuously see bold, unique films succeed in a special way, the way we hope this movie does. What no one tells you is that everyone is constantly going to be telling you no; most people around you are not going to be sure about it and prefer to take a safe approach. Look what people are responding to, though. Look at what really pops: bold choices. But everyone’s afraid to make those choices.
The relationship to masculinity these two characters explore is something I find really special about “Twinless.” Roman and Dennis bring out different sides of each other in a friendship that feels unusually fluid and intimate, and they’re both working through some painful, self-contradicting aspects of their own identities. What can you tell me about that side of this story?
JS: What’s interesting for Roman, especially in the wake of his brother’s death, as he’s trying to find solace in his relationship with Dennis, is that so much of twin identity for him has been about the ways he’s the same as and different from his identical twin brother, who is gay. Roman starts to question his own masculinity; we see this in moments, such as the hotel-room scene, where we witness both softer and harder kinds of masculinity in Roman.
Going back to duality, there’s such a dichotomy in what it means to be a man today, but I think what’s beautiful about their friendship is how they like to accept that in each other. I mean, I love a bromance. It’s honestly novel, but some of my closest friends are straight men, and I don’t feel like I’ve seen those kinds of friendships portrayed in a film.
DO: It’s a lovely question, so thank you for that, and it’s an aspect of this that I fundamentally understood from the first time I read the script. It’s one of the pieces of the project that was most special, that I felt I had within me: this relationship to masculinity that I feel like I’ve never quite conventionally had myself. I straddle two sides. There was a lot of femininity in how I was raised; I would say I was predominantly raised by my mother. My father was away a lot for work—not that he wasn’t in my life, he certainly played a large role—but my mother was with me every day. I’ve always felt inherently comfortable around women, and with my own femininity as a man, in a way that doesn’t tie to my sexuality. And it doesn’t have to.
JS: I think this is part of why you understood this script so well.
DO: Especially at the time when we grew up, that was really not understood, and forget about it being represented. I think about the environment I encountered back in high school, growing up as a teenage boy in those social circles, and realizing what was expected of me. That’s evolving, I do think, but I still think that it’s absolutely a worthy topic, and why I understood the language so much.
“Twinless” opens in theaters Sept. 5, via Roadside Attractions.