Richard Ayoade’s second film as a director, The Double , starring Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska, opens in theaters this week. And, despite his self-deprecating comments, it’s really good.
Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska in The Double.
Dean Rodgers/Magnolia Pictures
To call Richard Ayoade's new movie The Double a future cult classic feels like damning it to be ignored. But like Terry Gilliam's Brazil and David Lynch's Eraserhead, with which it would share a theoretical Netflix microgenre ("Surreal Black Comedies Set In Ridiculously Bleak Urban Landscapes"), The Double is the kind of film you imagine people are going to continue to happily discover over the years.
The dark fable, which opens in theaters in New York and Los Angeles this Friday and in more cities in the following weeks, centers on a man so forgettable that when a new employee who's physically identical to him arrives at his workplace, no one notices the resemblance. Starring Jesse Eisenberg as both Simon James and James Simon and Mia Wasikowska as Simon's co-worker and crush Hannah, The Double is as grim as it is dryly clever, a social anxiety nightmare in which a doppelgänger shows up to prove how much more popular and successful you could be if you just weren't so... you.
The Double is based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 19th-century novella of the same name, though Ayoade and his co-writer Avi Korine (brother of Harmony of Spring Breakers notoriety) have taken the tale in a different direction after the introduction of the mysterious doppelgänger, from "schizophrenic descent" into an exploration of loneliness and invisibility. "The thing that we liked about the story is that the two look identical, but everyone for some reason just likes the other one," Ayoade explains. "They always would pick the other one. If they both told a joke, they would laugh at the other one even if they said it in exactly the same way. That was part of the nightmarish aspect of it — there's no reason. His manifestation is about Simon's state."
Landing a big, crowd-pleasing punchline doesn't seem like a pressing concern for Ayoade, for whom cult classics have been something of a specialty. The London-born, Cambridge-educated writer, director, actor, and comedian was one of the forces behind Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, a terrific and terrifically strange British horror comedy series that pretended to be a never-broadcast '80s show finally being aired and intercut with present-day interviews with the cast members. The single six-episode 2004 season built up a devoted following online (and it can be and absolutely should be watched on Hulu).
Ayoade was also part of the original cast of the TV incarnation of The Mighty Boosh, though he ended up turning his role over to Darkplace co-star Matt Berry after the pilot, returning to play shaman/DJ Saboo in later seasons. His best-known role in front of the camera to date, however, has been in The IT Crowd, a British sitcom created by Father Ted's Graham Linehan about the basement-dwelling IT team of an otherwise slick London corporation. Ayoade played the cheerily awkward Maurice Moss opposite Chris O'Dowd's more easygoing but just as geeky Roy Trenneman on the series, which aired in the U.S. on IFC and is currently streaming on Netflix).
Chris O'Dowd as Roy Trenneman, Richard Ayoade as Maurice Moss, and Katherine Parkinson as Jen Barber on the original U.K. IT Crowd.
G4
The IT Crowd, which ran from 2006–2010, was targeted for a U.S. remake by NBC that had Ayoade reprising his role as Moss opposite Joel McHale as Roy. Though it was picked up to series in 2007, the remake was canceled before it ever went into production, and the pilot has since turned up online as another fascinating (if not particularly adept) example of television that never came to be.
Ayoade did, however, get the opportunity to work with McHale when he directed a Season 2 episode of Community — "Critical Film Studies," in which Danny Pudi's Abed takes Jeff Winger (played by Ayoade's could-have-been co-star) to a restaurant for what turns out to be an homage to My Dinner with Andre.
"He's so brilliant in that show and so suited," Ayoade says, in a way that was perhaps less the case for the part of Roy. "I remember thinking, You are so handsome and a computer nerd. How would I have met you? You're too handsome for me to even encounter outside of Hollywood."
"But maybe that's not a problem here," he muses of American stars. "You have really handsome people. If David Schwimmer can play a geek, I guess he can as well."
Despite a few of his own flirtations with Hollywood, like his part alongside Jonah Hill, Ben Stiller (an executive producer on Ayoade's directorial debut Submarine), and Vince Vaughn in the 2012 comedy The Watch, Ayoade displays no urgency to break into the U.S. mainstream. He embodies what might be called the extreme opposite of urgency. He says he's had offers to direct a studio movie, but doesn't know how serious they were, since he turned them down. "I need a really compelling reason to leave the house," he says plainly. "I really like being in my house, and seeing my wife, and increasingly I just don't want to leave."
And as for the IT Crowd remake, which would have brought them to L.A. for a stretch of time? "At that stage we were relatively mobile. We weren't as decrepit as we currently are, just worn down by age," the 36-year-old explains.
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