Evil doubles -a homage to classic Star Trek?
I’m a fan of all the original Star Trek episodes, but we were very conscious of the double Kirk transporter accident scenario.
There have been so many classic twins in television history: Samantha’s sister on Bewitched and Geni’s twin on I Dream of Genie. It’s a rich place.
I had actually pitched a double Xander episode in one of my first seasons because I thought, "We’ve got an actor with an identical twin, how can we not use this, this is such an opportunity. We can do the shots without having to do the cheesy green screen thing, we can use both actors." It just seemed like a natural to me so I was really happy when I got the opportunity to do that.
An interesting nugget about that episode was it was originally called Real Me (the eventual title of episode two) and we decided to change it because we didn’t want to give away the fact that both Xanders were real. They were both Xander.
Did you find that writing the episode made you think about the different aspects of your own personality?
I don’t know if writing that episode really made me think about the different components of me. It certainly made me think about the different components of Xander.
When you think about this character, we’ve seen so many different aspects of him over the years - the braveness, the trueness, the stalwartness - he’s really the truest friend you could have. At the same time, we’ve given him a callowness and a shallowness and a lack of self confidence.
To realise that Joss has created a character that’s rich enough that there’s enough for two real people there, that’s kind of cool.
