SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from “Twinless,” now in theaters.
James Sweeney has a thing for twins. In his new quirky dark comedy, “Twinless,” he and Dylan O’Brien play Dennis and Roman, two men who form an unlikely friendship when they meet at a support group for people whose identical twins have died.
In one scene, Dennis is shown watching Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen in their 1995 comedy “It Takes Two.” Sweeney, who wrote and directed “Twinless,” reached out to the former child actors with a letter. “I think I espoused my love for them and begged them to use their likeness from the classic ‘It Takes Two,’” he recalls. “Incidentally, they’re not playing actual twins in the movie. They’re just playing people who look identical to each other.”
Since the film’s premiere at Sundance earlier this year, many have been assuming Sweeney has a twin in real life – he doesn’t. “I think twins were very much embedded into the cultural zeitgeist of my childhood,” he explains. “It wasn’t just the Olsens, but also ‘Sister, Sister’ and ‘The Parent Trap.’ And for me, being a military brat and having to hop around and start over a few times, I think it was sort of that fantasy of the perfect best friend who shares your sentences and wants to do all the activities you want to do. It was very appealing to me.”
O’Brien not only plays Roman but also portrays his twin, Rocky, in flashbacks. “I wanted somebody who I believed would have the versatility to pull from different characters, not just in terms of physical and emotional transformation, but also tonally, comedic and dramatic. I think that’s something that Dylan has in spades,” Sweeney says. “And even though I felt confident in that, getting to know him and then developing the film and working with him, it really surpassed my wildest dreams. I think he’s truly a chameleon, which I find to be rare in somebody who is also a more traditional, charismatic leading man actor. I think that’s what makes him so special.”
While a lot of attention has been paid to Dennis and Rocky’s sex scene, there’s another very intimate moment Sweeney and O’Brien haven’t talked about until now. While Dennis is giving Roman a foot massage (their friendship becomes quite a codependent bromance), he begins to suck one of his toes.
“I had a pillow over my face the whole time because I was cracking up,” O’Brien says, before pointing out, “I also scrubbed my toe in the bathtub beforehand.”
Sweeney says, “That was the easy part of the day. There were so many other things going on in that scene that I was more concerned about. I was more preoccupied with the shots that followed in terms of my emotional preparation.”
The actors had plenty of time to get comfortable with each other. O’Brien had been attached to the project for about four years before the film finally got greenlit. “It was similar on my first feature [2019’s “Straight Up”]. They had similar time spans in terms of how long the projects go from inception to production,” Sweeney says. “I think my batting average is like seven, eight years. I’ll claim the positive adjective, which is resilience. But maybe stubbornness would be the other side of that coin.”
“I would say what was different between this and my first project is I met David Permut, my producer, in 2019 and Dylan in 2020. So this one I shared the pain of pushing it uphill for all those years, which then also made sharing the fruits of the labor so much more rewarding,” he continued. “But I also think it’s a story that speaks to me. I love movies about friendship. The themes of loneliness, as well as identity and forgiveness, are concepts I’m really interested in.”
Sweeney has also spent time working in television, most notably as a writer on Gloria Calderón Kellett’s Prime Video comedy series “With Love.” “I love TV,” Sweeney said. “‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’ is the reason I am who I am. I think TV is an interesting place right now. I think right now I’m focused on film, but I’m trying to figure out where my voice fits in TV in a way that works in the marketplace.”
