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Spitting images: inside Britain’s top lookalike agency
When your offce Christmas party is crying out for an Elvis, or your product launch needs a glam boost of Cara Delevingne proportions, who you gonna call? Guy Kelly infltrates the clone-zone world of Britain’s biggest lookalike agency. Photographs by Danie
‘My dad saw Cara on a billboard at topshop on oxford street and texted Me in shock. he really thought it was Me’
Opposite lookalike agency owner Susan Scott, who’s been in the business for over 30 years, with her Cara, 24-year-old Jasmine Pattern (also above)
Noon on an unspectacular Wednesday in Surrey. At Sandown Park, a racecourse and events facility just of the A3, scores of IT sales professionals are gathering for a two-day trade show opaquely titled ‘Convergence Summit South.’
Anxious that the name lacks obvious glamour, the exhibitors, who all wear dull suits and oversized lanyards, have brought along creative backup in the hope it’ll vivify their stands. For most, this consists of free USB sticks or family tins of Celebrations. One has hired a roaming magician. But at the back of the vast hall, nestled between a vending machine and fre escape, Rochdale-based Zen Internet has upped the stakes. They’ve booked Britain’s premier Lewis Hamilton lookalike, and he is bored.
‘I try to steer clear of these,’ the good-natured clone whispers to me in a corner later, palpably relieved to be away from his post. ‘It’s a long day of standing around doing nothing, but I can’t really complain, can I? I’m getting paid to just look like someone.’
The man’s true identity – his Clark Kent, if you will – is that of Neil Davis, a 37-year-old graphics installer from Basildon in Essex. Today he is wearing an impressive replica of Hamilton’s Mercedes racing suit that his wife bought him on the internet (‘I’d better not get a stain on it – we haven’t looked at the washing instructions yet’), paired with a branded baseball cap and diamond earrings. The idea behind his booking, a Zen representative called Amanda proudly informs me, is that visitors ‘look again’ at the company. It seems only to be half working. Davis is successful at beckoning passers-by to hear about data services, but they’re generally just taking a selfe and walking away.
For this two-day job, Davis will be paid £900. It is money which, given that the requirements of his brief extend no further than ‘turn up and stand still’, he cannot readily reject. Davis has been doing this part-time since 2007, when friends pestered him into making his undeniable likeness to the then new motor-racing star ofcial by signing up to a lookalikes agency. That frst year he earned enough to allow his wife, Lynnette, an extended maternity leave. But while corporate appearances like this pay well (he once received £1,200 for 12 hours of waving), what he enjoys most is playing Lewis Hamilton’s back.
‘I do a lot of doubling for him in adverts and short flms. Basically, any time Lewis is needed for an ad he’ll do the close-ups, then I’ll cover the rest,’ Davis says. ‘Santander, for example, used to get two twohour slots with him a year, but the shoots took days. So I’d do a lot of Lewis walking away, or side on, or just his hands. He gets all the glory, but there’s a bit more for me to do, so that’s good.’
Davis is one of thousands of opportunistic individuals in the UK who make money from their resemblance, passing or otherwise, to famous faces. They are part of an industry that manages to be at once both quaintly bygone – a relic, along with waxwork fgures and celebrity calendars, of a preinternet showbiz age – and also entirely of the moment, apt for a society more obsessed with its idols than ever.
‘It’s just there now, isn’t it?’ declares Susan Scott, Davis’s agent, who brought the concept of professional doppelgängers to this country when she
founded her eponymous lookalikes company in 1979. ‘I don’t think it will die away or has ever particularly spiked. It is just part of the culture now.’
Scott is being modest. Thirty-six years ago she started with one name – a Queen Elizabeth II played by Jeannette Charles – on her books; today the database has upwards of 15,000, and scores more added each week. Other agencies have sprung up in competition over the last 15 years, but still none matches Scott’s sheer numbers.
‘Well some may have died, of course; we can’t check everyone, but there are a lot,’ Scott says, looking around at her cluttered Islington home ofce, the walls of which are covered in folders marked with celebrities’ names, each containing the headshots of their lesser-known twins. I notice the Daniel Craig fle has an impressive bulge, as one might expect at this time of year, while Russell Brand can only muster a mere three people willing to admit they bear his image.
Now 72, Scott has taken a step back from frontline service, and instead lets Helena Chard, 46, with whom she has built the business over the past two decades, and Caroline Green, 54, tirelessly handle the majority of bookings. For each lookalike placed at events across the globe, the agency takes a modest fixed fee of around the same as a standard showbiz booker. Faces come and go, but the three of them currently manage a list that includes 27 Harper Beckhams, a Junior Andre (Peter Andre and Katie Price’s 10-year-old son), a Bashar Al-Assad and fve Jeremy Corbyns. It is a broad church. So what, I ask, is the typical profle of a hopeful lookalike?
Scott pauses for thought. Before she has a chance to respond, Green barrels in.
‘Some of them are complete nutjobs, I tell you. We had this one bloke apply the other week, a perfect Kojak. We thought, “Brilliant, we’ve been looking for a Kojak”. But when he got here who did he tell us he wanted to be? Eric Cantona. Now let me tell you, Eric Cantona and Kojak do not look the same…’
She carries on at this pace for some time, reminiscing with the others about a Jason Statham who grew violent when he was told he couldn’t switch to Brad Pitt, and about a 5ft Liz Hurley with a respiratory disorder. Before the conversation gets out of hand, Chard steadies things.
‘There is a mental-health element that we need to be mindful of,’ she says. ‘You don’t want to delude people into thinking they are somebody they’re not, and we cannot guarantee work for anybody – that has to come from client interest – but we want to give people a chance, so we aren’t too picky.’
Though Green did once chase the manager of her local Marks & Spencer around the store telling him he looked like James Corden (‘he was having none of it’), for the most part applicants come to them, either at the ofce in person or by uploading their photograph on the agency website. Peak times, Scott says, are Friday and Saturday nights.
‘The weekend is when people have had a few drinks and they’re told they resemble somebody, then they either get the confdence to apply themselves or friends send in their photo as a prank.’
That’s just how it happened for Jasmine Pattern, a 24-year-old who works for a private members’ club in Mayfair, central London. Four years ago friends on Facebook told her she looked exactly like the model Cara Delevingne, a comparison then compounded whenever she went clubbing.
‘I used to get it on nights out all the time. People would take sly photographs of me, and sometimes I just went along with it,’ she says. ‘My dad even saw Cara on a billboard at Topshop on Oxford Street and texted me in shock. He really thought it was me.’
Pattern signed up with Scott last month, deciding there was money to be made out of her unwanted attention. Delevingne’s star is on the rise, after all, so demand will be there. As for any lookalike, however, Pattern’s success will be entirely out of her control: she will ride the peaks and troughs of Delevingne’s career, not the other way around. And if the world stops loving Cara, what hope is there for her lowly replica?
It is a cruel phenomenon that Scott is all too aware of. Over the years she has seen innumerable impersonators suddenly cast adrift by the misfortunes of their counterparts. Some fall as sharply as they rose, like Nick Clegg; some are the victims of changing standards in political correctness, like a Bruce Forsyth impersonator Scott remembers blacking up in the 1980s to double as Sammy Davis Jr. Others are the victims of wider conspiracies, such as Mike Farley, a Henry VIII who complained in October that Michael Gove’s decision to remove the Tudors from the Key Stage 2 history syllabus had all but ruined his living. Lately, as well, Operation Yewtree, the police investigation into historic sexual abuse allegations by well-known entertainers, has caused Scott to shred a few fles.
‘The Saviles were straight out, obviously,’ she says. ‘Then Rolf Harris too. It can be difcult to keep up with it. Clif Richard was a bit of a worry for a while, wasn’t he? Thankfully he’s OK now.’
Nothing is quite so shocking (or inconvenient), however, for a lookalike as death. There tends to be an unspoken fallow period after a celebrity’s passing, a time in which bookings for that individual are viewed as bad taste. That continues for 10-15 years, before grief eventually turns to nostalgia. It is for this reason that Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe remain the most popular of Scott’s bookings, while
‘some of Them are complete nutjobs. The other week, a perfect kojak came in, but who did he want To be? eric cantona’ ‘The weekend is when people have had a few drinks… Then They either apply Themselves or friends send in Their photo as a prank’
one canny impersonator, with a wig adjustment and shift in dialect, has switched from cilla to nicola sturgeon
Princess Diana is on the cusp of a comeback. Things are less sunny for Amy Winehouse’s double, who has appeared only in a morbid Channel 5 autopsy documentary since the singer’s death in 2011. As for the recently departed Cilla Black, Scott tells me of one canny impersonator who, with a neat adjustment of her auburn wig and slight shift in dialect, has found work as SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon.
Happily, the lookalike most untroubled by setbacks to their reallife counterpart is also Scott’s very first. Jeannette Charles, now 88, played the Queen uninterrupted for 42 years, having been identifed as a dead ringer for her by a perceptive portrait artist in 1971. If there ever was a golden age of lookalikes, Charles was at the heart of it.
‘Oh, it was phenomenal. In those early days there wasn’t a show or a celebrity I didn’t meet,’ she remembers. ‘I was on The Two Ronnies, I met Muhammad Ali, performed with Liberace, did an advert with Jerry Hall… I was shooting in and out of Hollywood like nobody’s business.’
In her pomp, Charles – who refuses to divulge to anyone if she has met the real Elizabeth – was booked by Scott to appear all over the world, including starring as the Queen in the Naked Gun flms, and again in Mike Myers’ comedy Austin Powers
in Goldmember. She accepted almost everything, but does remember turning down Sacha Baron Cohen for Ali
G Indahouse. ‘He was perfectly pleasant,’ she says, ‘but said he wanted the Queen’s knickers to fall down as she gets in a limousine. I had to draw the line there.’
Instead that particular role went to Jeanette Vane, who has since taken up the mantle left by Charles’s retirement last year. The 87-year-old takes work as it comes, in between unpaid shifts as a teaching assistant at her local primary school. She lives alone in Bromley, having been widowed in 2010, and joined Scott’s agency in the same year. Playing the Queen has given her a new lease of life. ‘It gets me out of the house. I get very lonely at home, but seeing the reaction of people when I am out and about in character is wonderful,’ she says, speaking in an unexpectedly estuary accent. ‘I get to do such interesting things, and the ladies at Susan Scott are so caring. I couldn’t ask for anything more than being the Queen, I really couldn’t.’
Back at Sandown Park, Lewis Hamilton is approaching the end of his sentry duty. He’s keen to get back to his Vauxhall Insignia and beat the rush-hour trafc. With another day on the Zen stand tomorrow, I begin to wonder if he has ever considered hanging up the racing suit.
‘Someday, yes,’ he says. ‘There are people that think I’m going to dedicate my life to being Lewis, but I can’t go on for ever. These earrings are only magnetic. I wear a cap because I can’t bring myself to dye my hair. I’m a father of two; away from all this, I sometimes just want to go home and be Neil Davis, you know?’