James Sweeney has made peace with the fact that what he’s done might be unforgivable. His Sundance breakout, Twinless, recently blindsided critics (in the best way), promising a quirky bromance and delivering instead a twisted, acerbic examination of loneliness that used a bioevolutionary phenomenon as its driving vehicle. And his character was the one yanking the proverbial rug.
“I wish I could say I don’t give a shit what people think but I want to be liked like everyone else,” Sweeney tells UPROXX. “There was always a fear of turning people off. My thing is I’m always going to have fears. I just don’t want to let that prohibit me from doing what I think is best creatively.”
Those creative swings aren’t something we’ll spoil here except to say that, whatever movie you think you’re sitting down for when Twinless eventually gets its wide release – you’re wrong. The late scrolling title credits will no doubt jar you back to reality, setting you adrift on a journey that’s both thrilling and unsettling, mostly because its destination is completely unknown.
Sweeney plays Dennis, an isolated and acid-tongued twink who befriends Dylan O’Brien’s Roman at a bereavement group for those who have lost their twin. O’Brien pulls double duty here, playing both Roman (the dull-witted but well-meaning himbo of this story) and Rocky (his charming, successful, and as of recently, very deceased, counterpart). Rocky and Dennis’ shared sexual orientation lead to some fumbling musings by Roman on nature versus nurture and the existence of the “Gay gene,” cementing it as one of the stranger meet cutes you’ll see on screen this year.
But you’ll likely find yourself rooting for their friendship to work – at least in the beginning – because the boys are lonely. According to Sweeney, both “equally fucked up in their own ways.” Roman needs someone to fill the void his carbon copy has left, to go grocery shopping with, to point out the difference between lemons and limes. Dennis yearns for a stand-in too, a plus one to any awkward after-hours co-working events who can introduce him to violent spectator sports funded by stale pretzels and craft beer.
Their bromance is refreshingly sweet, in spite of all the grief and heartbreak that fuels it.
“We rarely ever see friendships explored specifically about gay men and straight men,” Sweeney explains. “Those are some of the closest relationships in my life. My cinematographer Greg*, he’s my best friend. We met freshman year of film school.”
*This film is not about Greg.
“Our cultural ideas of masculinity are slowly shifting. And I think it was interesting for Dylan and I to be able to explore that through these characters,” he continues. “I mean even the relationship to violence and talking about their feelings. I don’t think that Roman and Dennis are necessarily the role models of male friendship, but I do think there are a lot of aspects of their friendship that I admire, and I think it’s part of why people respond to the movie, because they have a lot of good times together.”
Casting O’Brien, who’s pivoted from early, big-budget YA fare to indie arthouse projects that often showcase his impressive range, was one of the turning points in the creational odyssey of the film.
Sweeney’s feature debut, a quick-witted rom-com called Straight Up, was well received by critics in 2019. He didn’t harbor any “grandiose expectations” in terms of career-changing trajectory, but he also didn’t expect to find himself broke and taking a Java Script course online during lockdown – a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency measure that almost led to him quitting Hollywood. He phoned his agents, begging for any kind of gig, and lucked out with a staffing on Gloria Calderon Kellet’s latest Amazon Prime series, With Love.
“It was a life-changing job for me,” Sweeney says.
He joined the WGA. He got health insurance. After months of searching, he found a therapist who accepted that health insurance. And he learned how to play tennis. He was in a good place … but he still had twins on the brain.
“I think there is something appealing about twins because it sort of fulfills the fantasy of a soulmate. ‘They understand me. I don’t even have to say anything and they’ll be feeling sad.’ That sort of the fantasy of it. The reality can be quite different, but I think that’s where the obsession comes from, especially for people who are struggling with loneliness. They look at them and go, ‘I want that, that feeling. I want to feel understood and seen.’”
When O’Brien’s reps reached out about a possible Zoom meeting, he was seasoned enough to temper his optimism with caution.
“I heard how much he responded to the script and how eager he was to meet me, so I felt good going into it, but talking to him… I mean, talk about feeling seen. He just gets my voice,” Sweeney explains. “I’m just such a fan of his as a performer, his range comedically, dramatically. I think he’s such a versatile actor and it’s been so wonderful to watch him transform. I think it was sort of the best of both worlds where he’s a phenomenal actor who wanted to do the movie, but also he’s just a really wonderful person who evolved into a friend and that made the process of making it feel like I had a partner in crime. He’s an executive producer on film, so every step, every heartbreak… we’ve been on this journey together.”
O’Brien shoulders the burden of conveying the film’s more dramatic, emotionally searing moments, making tweaks to his voice, mannerisms, and appearance to sell the seeing-double aspect of his role. Sweeney recalls how they obsessed over everything, O’Brien sending selfies with fake mustaches of varying lengths and thickness, to nail down the difference between the twins on-screen. The thought? The more the audience connected with the we – the idiosyncratic differences that made each sibling unique and likable – the more devastating it would be to see the aftermath, the “me.”
“Whenever I see a twin die and it [doesn’t] really have any implication on a storyline, it makes me go, ‘Come on,’” Sweeney says. “To me it’s the most heartbreaking because it’s a loss of self. I mean, every twin relationship is different, it’s not a monolithic experience, but it’s such a unique and complex relationship.”
But, while Twinless is certainly a love letter to that rare familial bond, Sweeney isn’t precious about it – or how his character’s choices when dealing with the guilt and grief of losing someone might be received. It’s his willingness to probe deeper, to make us confront the uncomfortable truth that duality is inherent in our nature, that good people can do bad things, that we all harbor parts of ourselves we don’t necessarily like, that makes his film better than what we expected. He trades in surface-level laughs for something stickier, a complex and thought-provoking musing on loneliness and our sense of self and the lengths we might go to for connection.
We can forgive him for that.