Three of the main characters were the same actor, and yet there are shots with all of them in the same scene. When I saw this as a young adult I didn’t even notice that Mike Myers was playing three roles and was genuinely dumbfounded years later when I found out.

How did they do those scenes so seamlessly?

  • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
    761·
    1 month ago

    A few different film techniques.

    they could film the actor in different costumes on the same set without moving the camera, and then they put those performances together.

    so you can have the profile of Austin powers on the left talking to the profile of Dr. evil on the right, and those were separate performances pasted together so it looks like they’re responding to each other even though Mike Myers was performing those conversations separately during different recordings.

    If evil and Austin are in the same shot and it’s an over-the-shoulder, the actor facing the camera is the real actor and the guy not facing the camera is a body double with the same hair or bald mask

    so if you were looking at Austin and Dr. evil in the same shot, either those are two separate performances put together and you’ll see that they never touch each other, or if they do touch each other, you’ll notice that you never see the frontal face of one of the actors, which is actually a body double.

    and you can see these two techniques and others used in Eddie Murphy’s movies, or pretty much any body double move movie.