Richard Ayoade is known in Britain for his role on a show about computer nerds and his weird voice and glasses and big hair. He’s known for a few of those things Stateside, too, and probably for being in that shitty alien movie The Watch with Ben Stiller and some others.
Ayoade, whose name I know you’re trying to pronounce out loud (and you’ll never do it right unless you hear it said), made his directional debut with Submarine, which found him favourably compared to a man named West Anderson. Oh, sorry, Wes Anderson. Will Ayoade take his place as the British version of said quirky director? We’d have to see another film to make such judgements, surely?Â
The Double, anyway, Richard Ayoade’s upcoming flick, doesn’t look very Wes Anderson at all. In fact, it’s set to be a dark and curious little tale based on the Fyodor Dostoevsky novel of the same name. Our screen version, bound to be deathly comic and deliciously dry, concerns Jesse Eisenberg, a buttoned-down bureaucrat who begins to question his existence when a man who looks exactly like him turns up at his office (Noah Taylor). Check out the first pictures below.
Noah Taylor’s double, it seems, is the exact opposite of Eisenberg’s character in every single way: brash, confident and even aggressive. Will these two unlikely souls team up against the man and unite in a righteous sense of friendship? No, I’d imagine not. Maybe the film will end with one double, like, strangling the other double, and then it’s all like, “Sometimes it’s so hard to accept yourself that you feel like you’re choking yourself.” Yeah.
Anyway, the book was set in Russia and this one is set in American. That’s how these adaptations work.
The Double is out in the UK in 2013.
Source: Total Film
