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Famous faces who share the same name

Brian Cox (actor)

and Brian Cox

(physicist) Prof Brian Cox, the award-winning particle physicist, and Brian Cox, the star of HBO’S Succession, have often been confused with one another because of their identical names.

Speaking on BBC Breakfast together, they said they often arrived somewhere to find that people were expecting “the other” Brian Cox.

Prof Cox revealed that he had to use a different name when at a hotel, as he was told that their system wasn’t able to handle two separate bookings under the same name.

In a joint interview with The Guardian, the Succession actor told Prof Cox that it had “annoyed me initially… to find someone who is extraordinarily successful with the same name as me”.

But he then added that he was pleased it was the case after the pair met.

Cox, a classically trained Shakespearean actor, has won two Laurence Olivier Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, as well as a Golden Globe Award.

Michelle Williams (singer) & Michelle Williams (actress)

The former Destiny’s Child singer and the Dawson’s Creek

actress share identical names and have previously spoken about being mistaken for one another.

The R&B singer addresses the confusion in September 2019 when she started to receive messages about her namesake’s controversial Emmys speech about pay inequality in Hollywood. “How come when y’all are tagging and congratulating a person, do y’all see that I’m black?” she said in an Instagram Live video. “When you go to my profile, you search for the ‘Michelle Williams,’ I am black. OK?

She added: “So I am trying to figure out why in the world I am getting cursed out in my comments for Michelle Williams’ speech... but yeah, I just told a woman a few minutes ago on my Instagram, I was like, ‘I’m so sorry that my namesake upset you, but can’t you see that I’m black?’”

Sir Steve Mcqueen (director) and Steve Mcqueen (late actor)

Sir Steve Mcqueen, the Oscar-winning director of 12 Years a Slave, shares a name with the legendary late actor of Le Mans, Bullitt and The Great Escape. The moviemaker has since revealed that he was named after the actor Steve Mcqueen after staff at the hospital of his birth suggested it to his mother. He told

The Daily Mirror: “I was born the same year as Bullitt in 1969 and what happened was in those days, they had the baby at the end of the bed and ‘Mcqueen’ was written on the basket. And the nurses would pass and say to my mother ‘How’s Steve doing?’ And my mum thought, ‘It’s not Steve. Where is that coming from?’. But Steve, it started to have a nice ring to it.” He has also revealed his favourite Mcqueen film is The Magnificent Seven, as it was one of the first that he saw in the cinema, before he became an award-winning member of the industry himself.