Dylan O’Brien and James Sweeney Talk Twinless with a Twin

Every so often there’s a film that you become indelibly connected to as a film critic, and one of the reasons is because I’m going to miss having the Sundance Film Festival in Park City. It was at Sundance this year that I experienced Twinless, the entertaining and thoroughly original comedy-drama from writer/director James Sweeney. Now that Twinless is hitting theaters, a wider audience will have a chance to see it, but as an identical twin who had to face the possibility of losing my brother 16 years ago, when the credits rolled in January, I didn’t feel so much like I’d just seen a great film as that one had seen me.

“The premiere at Sundance wasn’t the first time that I’ve had twins watch the film,” Sweeney says, recalling the moment when I spoke to him after the premiere at the Eccles Theater and we hugged. “I feel like almost everybody self identifies as a twin and either has an anecdote or a question and shares an experience, and that’s been a really lovely part of this process.” While Twinless is in large part a comedy, it deals with subject matter that is anything but funny: losing a person who is a part of you. Roman (O’Brien) is grieving over the sudden loss of his twin brother Rocky when he meets Dennis (Sweeney) at a support group for twins without twins. They form a bond, based in part on the fact that, like Rocky, Dennis is gay. Roman and Dennis become almost inseparable, dealing with their grief and finding catharsis together — until Roman’s involvement with Dennis’ co-worker, Marcie (Aisling Franciosi, The Nightingale, Speak No Evil), reveals a hidden truth that could change everything.

“I guess the best way that I can articulate how I approached it is that I looked at it as almost one shared human at different evolutions of their life,” O’Brien says. The talented star on the Maze Runner films made a big splash with a riveting performance in the 2024 Sundance premiere Ponyboi, and with Twinless, O’Brien relished the challenge of embodying two characters with shared DNA but very different spirits. “We see Rocky as being driven by such a liberated experience that he accessed through experience and yearning and curiosity and acting on those things,” O’Brien explains. ”Whereas we see Roman still these incubator years of his own existence.” The contrast between Rocky, who had embraced who he was and learned to love himself, and Roman, who suffers from anger issues and struggles to define himself outside of his relationship with his brother, is the dichotomy that drew O’Brien to the material. “Roman is so much less far along on a journey on this Earth than his brother was,” O’Brien says. “And in so many ways, those are the things that detailed the differences that we see between them, and the differences that led them apart and led them to have this conflict that sadly was where they left things. But I think the beautiful sort of irony of the story is that the loss for Roman is the experience that enables him to finally embark on those types of experiences that his brother had.”

The other level upon which Twinless spoke to me, though perhaps not quite as viscerally as it did to me as a twin, was as a rabid Gilmore Girls fan. Television icon Lauren Graham, who plays the role of Roman and Rocky’s grieving mother, Lisa, arrived late to the premiere, and I was one of a group of heartbroken journalists who watched as she passed by us, and there may or may not currently be a support group called Grahamless devoted to dealing with that loss. “I’m also a huge fan of Gilmore Girls,” Sweeney says. “Actually, in my first film, Straight Up, that’s something the protagonists bond over, is their mutual love for Gilmore Girls. So I was initially unsure if casting Lauren would be too meta, but I quickly got over that and I have to say she is just not only a wonderful actress but just a light of a human being.”

O’Brien echoes the sentiment. “She’s a real one. There’s so many people, there’s people in this industry that can just be divided by real ones and not real ones,” O’Brien says. “And by that, I mean, it’s so common to encounter someone in the position of Lauren as being so, you know, just out of touch to a point where  they’re just not even like a human anymore. And Lauren’s a human. I love her absolutely. “

Twinless is a moving story of loss and the fragility of what we have to leave behind, as well as what stays with us forever. It’s also a story of connection, discovery, acceptance, connection and learning how to show love to those closest to us, and not least of all, to ourselves. It’s a study of duality and divided halves becoming whole that is truly one of a kind.

Read more film interviews conducted by Patrick Gibbs:
Matthew Chuang’s Epic Journey Shooting Chief of War
The Horrors of Being Trolled: 35 years of Troll 2 and Identifying as a Goblin