Mixing family with business! Many famous families have several actors in them — and some of those relatives have gone on to share the screen together.
Robbie Amellwho worked with his cousin Stephen Amell on projects like The Flashpreviously explained how they looked too alike to share scenes with one another.
“It’s tough, we’re pretty similar in look. We’re not going to play related,” Robbie told Entertainment Weekly in December 2019. “That was part of the reason they wouldn’t let [our characters] talk to each other on The Flashthey were like, ‘It’s too weird. People know you’re related, you can’t talk to each other.’
Robbie and Stephen would later go on to work together on their crowd-funded film, Code 8.
“Part of it was we just needed to create something for ourselves. We figured if we weren’t willing to take a bet on ourselves, then why should we expect anyone else to?” Robbie explained to EW. “We wanted to give it a shot and make something that we would be proud of, something that people backing us would be proud of.”
Not all family members want to work on the same projects though, including Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaalwho were reluctant to team up. Richard Kelly previously spoke about having to talk Maggie into taking the role in Donnie Darko alongside her brother.
“Immediately, she was like, ‘Richard, you’re only offering this to me because I’m Jake’s big sister. You should be finding the best actress for the role,’” the director told Vox in April 2017. “So she was already trying to talk me out of casting her, in a very selfless way. And I was just really impressed by that … So I was really determined to convince her to do it after that.”
The film wouldn’t be what it was without the brother-sister dynamic that Maggie and Jake brought to their roles.
“Maggie was really an essential piece of the puzzle that makes that family dynamic work in the film,” Kelly added. “I’m grateful that she agreed to do the role.”
Dave Franco also went out of his way not to work with his brother James Franco earlier on in his career.
“For a while, I made a conscious decision not to work with him, just because I wanted to pave my own path,” Dave said during an interview with Variety in November 2017. “I didn’t want to be referred to as ‘James Franco’s little brother’ for the rest of my life. But we have very similar sensibilities.”
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