Jake on creating characters Adam & Anthony in Enemy

MANILA, Philippines - What would you do if you discover someone who looks exactly like you?

The reality of finding your doppelganger or a mirror image or yourself is the intriguing premise of the upcoming psychosexual thriller Enemy, released by Solar Pictures.

Based on the novel The Double by José Saramago, Enemy tells the story of a university lecturer named Adam (Jake Gyllenhaal) who is nearing the end of a relationship with his girlfriend Mary (Melanie Laurent). One night, while watching a film, Adam spots a minor actor who looks just like him. Consumed by the desire to meet his double, Adam tracks down Anthony (Jake), an actor living with his pregnant wife Helen (Sarah Gadon) and engages him in a complex and dangerous struggle. 

“In terms of finding a lead actor for these dual parts, I was looking for someone who I would be able to share creativity and collaborate with,” notes Academy Award-nominated director Denis Villeneuve (Incendies, Prisoners).

“First and foremost I wanted to make this movie because I think Denis is an incredible filmmaker,” says Jake. “I was really drawn to the incredible script which offered an interesting blueprint for what Denis wanted to do with this idea. When I first met with Denis and talked about the film, his idea of what it was and what he wanted it to be far surpassed what the script was saying.”

Jake had the unique task of playing two different characters that become entwined in each other’s lives. As can be expected, there was a delicate dance involved in creating the similarities and differences between the two characters. Denis and Jake agreed early on that the differences between Adam and Anthony should lie in subtleties.

“There are so many ways that you can go with this movie and I think probably the hardest one, the most interesting one, was making Adam and Anthony as close to each other as possible,” says Jake. “There’s the world in which one character has a beard and the other one doesn’t and one talks with a funny accent and the other one doesn’t. That would have been an incredibly vain way of going about it and I think, in a way, that’s exactly what this movie isn’t about.”

Distributed by Solar Pictures, Enemy opens nationwide today.