She called Birch while the writer was on a family holiday in Italy. Her screenplay for Lady Macbeth, the screen adaptation of the 19th century Russian play and the movie that introduced international audiences to Weisz’s Black Widow costar Florence Pugh years earlier, had also left an impression on the star. “I’d missed seeing it, somehow, but ended up reading it and thought it was brilliant” - and how Birch’s voice had stood out to her even on the page. She remembered Alice Birch’s semi-experimental play Revolt, She Said.

Regardless, Dead Ringers had imprinted on her in a big way. Most Perfectly Developed Kidneys”) and intellectual musings about identity, sexuality, and biology. Or maybe it was just the sheer weirdness of it all, offset by a wickedly perverse sense of humor (“I’ve often thought there should be beauty contests for the insides of bodies… Best Spleen. Maybe it was the manner in which Jeremy Irons found a way to channel his late ’80s suavest-reptile-in-the-pit persona across not one but two distinct yet interconnected characters. Maybe it was the way that Cronenberg turned what could have been mere true-crime tabloid fodder into something, well, Cronenbergesque, with elements of body horror and sublimated kink and a hallucinatory sense of hyperreality. The movie was just seared into my memory I must have revisited it again and again over the years.” “I never forgot it,” Weisz says over Zoom, sitting in front of an odd, slightly-off “picture window view” background that the Canadian filmmaker himself might have designed. The Oscar-winning actress doesn’t remember exactly when she saw Cronenberg’s 1988 thriller, but she definitely remembers the feeling of watching it for the first time. This is where Rachel Weisz comes into the picture. The only unsurprising aspects of all of this is that a) the film eventually ended up in the hands of David Cronenberg, because who else could possibly do this bizarro story justice, and b) it’s a disturbing, unsettling masterpiece.

It goes without saying that the media had a field day, and that this stranger-than-fiction tale would inspire a bestselling piece of fiction ( Bari Wood and Jack Geasland’s 1977 novel Twins), that would in turn give birth to a movie adaptation. They would eventually be found together in a filthy apartment, both dead due to withdrawl symptoms from barbituates. One of them, Cyril, was characterized as slightly more socially awkward than his sibling, Stewart both were often referred to as “icy,” “aloof,” “remote.” It was rumored that the pair would sometimes switch places during the middle of exams with patients, one pretending to be the other. The brothers worked together at one of the finest hospitals in New York City and were a prominent part of Upper West Side high society. Once upon a time, there were two real-life identical-twin gynecologists.

Never Kiss a Stranger by Logan Chance